Due: June 18, 2025
Future Manufacturing seeks inventive approaches to invigorate the manufacturing ecosystem and seed nascent future industries that can only be imagined today. Future Manufacturing supports research and education that will enhance U.S. leadership in manufacturing by providing new capabilities for companies and entrepreneurs, by improving our health, quality of life, and national security, by expanding job opportunities to a diverse STEM workforce, and by reducing adverse impacts of manufacturing on the environment. At the same time, Future Manufacturing enables new manufacturing that will address urgent social challenges arising from climate change, global pandemics and health disparities, social and economic divides, infrastructure deficits of marginalized populations and communities, and environmental sustainability. Future Manufacturing will complement existing efforts, supported by NSF and other federal agencies, in advanced manufacturing, but the focus of this program is to enable new, potentially transformative, manufacturing capabilities rather than to improve current manufacturing. Proposals that are incremental improvements over existing advanced manufacturing technologies will not be competitive.