NSF invests $25.5M in research to drive new U.S. manufacturing technologies and talent pipelines

The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced a $25.5 million investment to support fundamental research and workforce development aimed at enabling future generations of U.S. manufacturing. This year's awards will support seven research grants and nine seed projects across 36 institutions and companies through the NSF Future Manufacturing (NSF FM) program.

The NSF FM program focuses on areas such as biomanufacturing, cyber manufacturing and ecomanufacturing, with some efforts exploring intersections with quantum manufacturing. The program emphasizes convergence, bringing together teams from across disciplines to create new, potentially transformative manufacturing capabilities, going far beyond improvements to current manufacturing processes.

"The FM program targets critical technical gaps and lays the foundation for emerging sectors, including technologies that haven't yet been imagined," said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. "NSF is investing in teams that bring together scientific, engineering and manufacturing expertise to equip the American workforce for leadership in advanced manufacturing."

This year's FM awards include:

• Seven research grants, each receiving up to $3 million over a four-year period, to support multidisciplinary teams conducting fundamental research to enable new manufacturing capabilities, materials, or systems. Projects span a range of topics, including bioengineering in resource-constrained environments, "recyclofacturing" using artificial intelligence to create products from metal scrap, and using robotics and digital twins for additive manufacturing of multi-material systems.
• Nine seed grants, each receiving up to $500,000 over a two-year period, to support early-stage teams exploring novel concepts and partnerships that could shape future directions in manufacturing. Seed projects include efforts in future photonic quantum manufacturing using DNA, self-learning tools to create superconducting circuits, using cyanobacteria and water for low-energy cement manufacturing, and enabling domestic lithium extraction from unconventional sources.

By advancing research in areas such as the manufacture of critical materials, quantum devices and semiconductor production, human-robot collaboration and biologically based manufacturing, the program strengthens U.S. leadership in science and technology, expands innovation capacity, and prepares a skilled American workforce to compete and lead in the global economy.

This brings NSF's total investment through the FM program to over $163 million in the five years of the program. Funding comes from across almost all of NSF's directorates, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of the supported projects. Since its inception, the FM program has made 104 awards to projects that involve over 475 principal investigators at 136 institutions and companies in 40 states and territories.