The US National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $25.5-million investment to support fundamental research and workforce development aimed at enabling future generations of US 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.

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.

This funding >brings NSF’s total investment through the FM program to more than $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.