Cooperative Agreement W911NF2020187

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a 4-year, $400,000 Project Grant under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) to Trustees of Boston University for their research project titled "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: DMREF: CLOSED-LOOP DESIGN OF POLYMERS WITH ADAPTIVE NETWORKS FOR EXTREME MECHANICS." The project aims to develop an integrated experimental and computational platform for accelerated discovery and design of novel polymers exhibiting unprecedented...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Project Grant, funded under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), aims to develop polymers with unprecedented mechanical properties and processibility for use in advanced applications like wearable sensors, soft actuators, and energy harvesting devices. The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) is leading this collaborative $350,229 research effort, which uses a systematic, data-driven approach to create adaptive polymer networks...

The National Science Foundation's Division of Materials Research awarded a 3-year, $500,000 project grant to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) to develop advanced polymeric materials with precisely controlled physical properties and hierarchical nanostructured architectures. The research aims to understand how the internal organization of polymer networks affects the mechanical, swelling, and surface properties of thin hydrogel coatings. Key objectives include: (A) studying the...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) provides $405,431 to The Regents of the University of California, doing business as University of California, Berkeley, to conduct collaborative research on developing polymers with adaptive molecular structures that can withstand extreme conditions. The key objectives are to: 1) pioneer the use of double-threaded polymers to fabricate slide-ring polymers for enhanced...

This $600,000 National Science Foundation project grant in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) supports research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop new methods for analyzing and optimizing polymer network structures. Professors Jeremiah A. Johnson and Bradley D. Olsen of MIT's Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering will work to invent chemical strategies, theories, and simulations to provide deeper understanding of topology in...

This $1,425,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Materials Research (DMR) under the Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer Our Future (DMREF) program (CFDA 47.049) supports collaborative research to develop programmable soft materials design and synthesis capabilities. The research aims to integrate molecular design codes, automated synthesis, and structural analysis to create an artificial intelligence-driven materials design platform with...

This $300,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry aims to develop novel polymeric materials based on segmented polar-polyolefin copolymers with complex architectures. Professors Eva Harth at the University of Houston and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski at Carnegie Mellon University are collaborating on this 3-year effort, which seeks to advance energy storage materials and plastic upcycling capabilities. The key products and services to be delivered...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry awarded a $645,000 Project Grant to faculty at Johns Hopkins University to conduct research on entropically constrained self-limiting supramolecular polymerization. The 3-year project, which commenced on July 1, 2024, aims to uncover the fundamental factors influencing the synthesis and properties of innovative supramolecular polymers that combine the strengths of traditional plastics with self-healing and responsive capabilities. Key...

This $493,588 project grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) aims to advance the fundamental understanding of how polymer networks, found in materials like tires and contact lenses, break and fracture. The research will formulate and validate a new molecular-level model to explain the intrinsic fracture energy of these polymer networks, incorporating the role of surrounding material structure and how energy is dissipated during failure....

Under a $600,000 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049), Dr. Aleksandr V. Zhukhovitskiy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is developing new methods to prepare polymeric materials with a high content of nitrogen atoms embedded within the polymer chains. The research seeks to improve the precision of the ring-opening polymerization of cyclic carbodiimides, as well as to develop alternative...