Project Grant W911NF261A016

This collaborative research project grant of $303,117, awarded August 1, 2025, through the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) and administered by the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation, funds fundamental research into bacterial flagellar mechanics and their applications to nanorobotic propulsion. The University of Utah will conduct integrated experimental and computational research to advance understanding of how flagellar stiffness...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) totaling $630,000 aims to develop "synthetic life-like materials and machines" using light-responsive active fluids. The project at Brandeis University will pursue two complementary research aims: Embedding a rigid inclusion in a photo-responsive active nematic liquid crystal to implement hybrid theory-experiment feedback and control the targeted dynamics of the...

This three-year, $1,031,012 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at the University of Chicago to develop active adaptive materials inspired by cell mechanics. The goal is to elucidate design principles for soft biomolecular materials whose actuation and shape are reprogrammable, similar to how actin cytoskeleton networks control cell shape and locomotion. Researchers will reconstitute cytoskeleton-like composite networks in vitro and optimize molecular engineering...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a $380,000 Project Grant under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The purpose of this 3-year award, with a start date of July 1, 2024, is to develop methods to enable feedback control over electric field-mediated assembly of supported membranes from porous particles of different shapes and materials. The key objectives are to: (1) measure and model the dipolar interactions of porous...

This five-year, $454,772 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems will fund foundational research at The University of Akron to develop a new class of biomimetic microrobots for applications in targeted therapeutics, environmental remediation, and microscale cargo delivery. Inspired by collective animal behaviors like schooling fish and flocking birds, the microrobots will utilize off-center repulsive...

This $150,000 two-year Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will fund research at Georgia Tech Research Corporation to develop novel stimuli-responsive mesoscale polymer materials inspired by worm blobs. The researchers will conduct biophysical experiments and mathematical modeling on California blackworms to understand how individual filaments and twisted filament pairs interact collectively to allow the worms to dynamically transform their blob...

This National Science Foundation Project Grant award of $299,998 provides funding from July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2024 to develop magnetothermal control of cell fates and function. The award is made under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to Michigan State University. Specifically, the funding supports research to engineer prokaryotic cells as programmable pseudo-organelles that can be controlled using alternating magnetic fields to activate mammalian transcription factors and...

This $379,600 National Science Foundation project grant supports research at Columbia University to develop autonomous micro-robots for navigation in complex microscopic environments. Specifically, the university will design time-varying magnetic fields to encode autonomous behavior of magnetic microparticles in response to gradients in surface topography and fluid velocity. Researchers will experimentally demonstrate particle navigation across landscapes and in microfluidic channels, informed...

This $499,518 National Science Foundation project grant supports fundamental research at the University of Minnesota to develop metamaterial architectures for programmable droplet motion control. The three-year award under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) will investigate designing vibrating metamaterials to program the locomotion of liquid droplets on solid surfaces. Specifically, the university researchers aim to realize control strategies that allow deep manipulation of fluid...

This $495,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences (CFDA 47.049) program funds research to develop structurally programmable adhesives with actively modulated performance for specialized applications such as wearable electronics, biomedical devices, and soft robotics. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, through its Office of Sponsored Research, will lead a 3-year effort to better understand how molecular brush architecture...