NSF Materials Innovation Platform
Harvard Pre-Proposal Deadline: January 12, 2015
Award Amount: $10,000,000-$25,000,000 over five years

The goal of the MIP Program is to provide national infrastructure in key enabling areas supported by a robust scientific program coupled with vigorous instrument and technique development activities.  These Platforms seek to substantially increase the rate at which new materials and new materials phenomena are discovered. MIPs push the frontiers of energy, spatial, and time resolution by developing next generation technologies, as well as advance the capabilities of current state-of-the-art experimental tools and techniques.  The proposed research program must be a collaborative and iterative process wherein theory guides computational simulation, computational simulation guides experiments, and experiments further informs theory. Through this tightly connected iterative process, new discoveries are anticipated to occur at a faster rate than conventional modes of collaboration. In addition, advances in each of the three areas (synthesis, characterization, and theory/simulation/modeling) are also expected. MIPs are inherently interdisciplinary and support efforts that span across the fields of materials science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and engineering.