Limited Submission – NSF – Materials Innovation Platforms (MIP) – NSF 25-521
Purpose: The National Science Foundation (NSF) Materials Innovation Platforms (MIP) is a mid-scale infrastructure program in the NSF 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 embrace the paradigm set forth by the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), which strives 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 scientists 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 training, for the purpose of accelerating discovery and development of new materials and novel materials phenomena/properties, as well as fostering their eventual deployment.
The scientific focus of the MIP program is subject to change from competition to competition. Information about the existing MIPs, from two previous competitions in 2015 and 2019, can be found at https://mip.org/. The third MIP competition, in 2025, will accept proposals on alloys, amorphous, and composite materials. Given that the second MIP competition included an emphasis on biomaterials and polymer research, proposals mainly on these topics will not be considered in the third MIP competition.
Each proposed project must be directed by a team of at least three Senior/Key Personnel with complementary expertise on materials synthesis/processing, characterization, theory/modeling/simulation, etc.
A webinar will be held Tuesday, January 14, 2025.
Eligibility: Individuals may be designated as Senior/Key Personnel (Principal Investigator/Project Director, co-PI, and other faculty or equivalent) on only one MIP proposal.
Funding Amount/Project Period: $18,000,000 to $30,000,000 over a 6 years
Link to Funding Opportunity Announcement
Institutional Limit: 1
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 February 18th, 2025:
- Names and departments or affiliations of the applicant and other key personnel or partners
- Title of program and/or funding opportunity announcement number
- Brief project description (2 pages maximum)
- Brief biographical sketch
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.