Purpose: The
National Science Foundation (NSF) Materials Innovation Platforms (MIP) is a mid-scale
infrastructure program in the Division of Materials Research (DMR) designed to
accelerate advances in materials research. MIPs respond to the increasing
complexity of materials research that requires close collaboration of
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams and access to cutting edge tools.
These tools in a user facility benefit both a user program and in-house
research, which focus on addressing grand challenges of fundamental science and
meet national needs. MIPs strive to "discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced
materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost," and conduct research
through iterative "closed-loop" efforts among the areas of materials
synthesis/processing, materials characterization, and
theory/modeling/simulation. In addition, they are expected to engage the
emerging field of data science in materials research. Each MIP is a scientific
ecosystem, which includes in-house research scientists, external users and other
contributors who, collectively, form a community of practitioners and share
tools, codes, samples, data and know-how. The knowledge sharing is designed to
strengthen collaborations among scientists and enable them to work in new ways,
fostering new modalities of research and education/training, for the purpose of
accelerating discovery and development of new materials and novel materials
phenomena/properties, as well as fostering their eventual
deployment.
MIPs
must support broad accessibility to a rich national user base at universities,
national laboratories, and industry. They operate user facilities that are open
to a diverse community of external and internal researchers at various
institutions. To promote usage of their facilities, MIPs do not charge academic
users in the United States for reasonable time with experts, technicians, or use
of equipment acquired through the MIP award. Major equipment acquired through
the MIP funding must devote at least 50% of the instrument operational time to
external users (defined as those who are neither MIP participants nor affiliated
with the institutions where MIP user facilities are located). Platforms
reside at academic institutions where the appropriate infrastructure, including
laboratory, common space and sharing of equipment, already exists to assist in
the proposed research and add value to the MIP user facility.
The scientific focus of the
MIP program is subject to change from competition to competition. The
2019 MIP competition focuses on the convergence of materials research with
biological sciences for developing new materials.
Eligibility:
Individuals may appear as
Senior Personnel on only one MIP proposal.
Funding Amount/ Project
Period: $15 million- $25 million
over five years
Link
to Funding Opportunity Announcement
Institutional Limit:
1 as lead
institution.
Internal
Competition: To
participate in the university’s selection process,please upload the
following,assembled
into a single PDF file, to the Office of the Vice President for Research via
this
portal
with a copy to your Associate Dean for Research by December 11,
2018:
A committee will be
convened to review the material and make a recommendation.
For questions or issues
with submission through the portal, email the limited submission mailbox
(limitedsubmissions@uky.edu), or call 257-2861.
Agency Deadline: February
04, 2019