NSF Future Manufacturing Grantees Conference; Washington, DC; 1-2 August 2024

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This award funds a conference to bring together Future Manufacturing (FM) grantees and program officers from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other federal agencies as appropriate. FM was created to support fundamental research, education, and training of a future workforce to catalyze the development of new and innovative manufacturing capabilities that do not exist today. FM aims to promote US leadership in advanced manufacturing, and enable advances in the fields of cyber-, eco- and biomanufacturing. This conference brings together FM awardees to foster engagement within the advanced manufacturing community across multiple domains including academia, industry, and government, to highlight progress in diverse areas of research, to identify new collaborative endeavors, and to address future grand challenges in the field. The following topics will be discussed throughout the conference: 1) Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, 2) Building Resilience into Manufacturing, 3) Translation into Commercial Sectors, 4) Sustainability in Manufacturing and 5) Education and Training Initiatives and Broader Impacts. A primary goal of this conference is to assess the current status and opportunities for FM across the US. Aims being pursued at this event include: 1) bringing together FM investigators to report on current project findings to date in partnership with the NSF, 2) interacting with other FM awardees to identify synergies and collaborations, 3) identifying methods to transition successful FM projects into the marketplace, 4) developing practices to expand workforce participation in diverse and inclusive environments. The conference will include oral sessions on FM-related activities and topics, breakout sessions on broad topics of common interest, and poster sessions outlining research advances by PIs. Results from the conference will be published for the FM research and broader community via a Conference Proceedings that will include a compilation of project abstracts. The conference will be held in downtown Washington DC 1-2 August 2024. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.