The Center for Nanoscale Science invites proposals for the 2024 Seed competition. This competition focuses on nucleating potential new Interdisciplinary Research Groups, looking forward to the upcoming MRSEC re-competition cycle in 2025–26.
“Seed-IRG” proposals should aim to coalesce world-leading interdisciplinary teams focused on an emerging high-risk/high-reward area of materials research, and should seek to demonstrate key results that could underpin a successful IRG in the upcoming NSF MRSEC competition. Two town hall discussions were held in late April to discuss the qualities of a successful Seed-IRG proposal.
Seed-IRG proposals contain three parts: (1) a project description not to exceed 5 pages total (12 point font, 1” margins; the page limit does not apply to references), (2) a very brief budget description, and (3) CV's of the principal investigators, of any reasonable length. The format of the budget statement is flexible.
Seed-IRG projects are anticipated to be funded at approximately 150K in direct costs over 12 to 18 months. The MRSEC anticipates supporting from one to three Seed-IRGs. The MRSEC Executive Committee will oversee the review of proposals, coordinating with the External Advisory Board. The Executive Committee will solicit the advice of anonymous reviewers as needed and will recuse as appropriate to mitigate any conflicts of interest.
Note that the NSF generally prefers to avoid substantial overlap between the research topics of different IRGs across the MRSEC program, so strong overlap with an existing MRSEC IRG elsewhere should be avoided. Information about these programs can be found at http://www.mrsec.org. If such overlap exists for your Seed-IRG topic, this should be addressed in your writeup.
Proposals should be submitted in a single self-contained pdf file to vhc2@psu.edu. The deadline for submission is 5pm on Thursday, May 23.
2024-2025 Seeds
Altermagnetic Materials
Team members: Binghai Yan, Cui-Zu Chang, Venkat Gopalan, Chao-Xing Liu, Zhiqiang Mao, and Nitin Samarth
Harnessing plant cell wall assembly for sustainable, reformable materials
Team members: Enrique Gomez, Daniel Cosgrove, Charles Anderson, and Ester Gomez
Crystallization in Glass-Ceramics
Team members: John Mauro, Seong Kim, and Collin Wilkinson
Chirality and hyperbolicity in engineered semiconductor nanotubes
Team members: Stephanie Law, Binhai Yan, Xingjie Ni, Josh Robinson, and Slava Rotkin
2023-2024 Seeds
Exploring Designer Topological Phases in Multi-Terminal Josephson Junctions
Team members: Morteza Kayyalha and Nitin Samarth
Shaping Light Using 2D Polar Metal Metasurfaces
Team members: Ken Knappenberger, Josh Robinson, Doug Werner, and Lei Kang
Nonlinear Materials for Quantum OptoElectronics
Lead by: Zhiqiang Mao, Jun Zhu, and Venkat Gopalan
Exploring Non-Reciprocal Superconducting Transport via Van der Waals Heterostructures
Team members: Chao-Xing Liu, Morteza Kayyalha, and Cui-Zu Chang
Carbon Nanothread Materials
Team members: Beth Elacqua, Adri van Duin, and Vin Crespi