NNCI Coordinating Office at Georgia Tech

The National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) comprises 16 university sites and their partners awarded individually by the National Science Foundation to provide open access to nanoscale fabrication and characterization user facilities and staff expertise across the nation. The NNCI Coordinating Office at Georgia Tech enhances the impact of NNCI as a national infrastructure network by promoting its capabilities, facilitating user access to its resources, sharing best practices, and improving overall efficiency through coordination of activities of the individual sites.

The Coordinating Office assists users from academe, industry, and government in finding NNCI fabrication and characterization resources to meet their research needs through an NNCI website and other marketing approaches. The Coordinating Office leadership, using site staff expertise, facilitates programs in education and outreach, social and ethical implications, computational modeling and simulation, and innovation and entrepreneurship across the network, and helps provide linkages with other national and international nanotechnology resources.

The overall activities of the NNCI Coordinating Office contribute to the economic competitiveness of the U.S. in training a globally competitive workforce and in providing efficient access to resources for commercialization of nanotechnology. They also help to inform and educate the general public on fundamentals and advances of nanoscience and engineering and their social and ethical implications.

The mission of the NNCI Coordinating Office is to support the interests of individual NNCI sites, site users, and the broader public using the combined assets of a nation-wide network of university-based nanotechnology user facilities. The Coordinating Office uses a variety of mechanisms to communicate availability of network assets to users of the facilities, foster interactions among the sites, and assess the impact of the various programs.

A primary mode for communication is a dedicated NNCI website, which allows new and existing users to efficiently locate capabilities and expertise within the network, and also provide up-to-date nanotechnology resources to students, teachers, and the broader public. To emphasize the importance of a network of sites, the Coordinating Office is guided by an Executive Committee with representation from all 16 sites as well as a number of Working Groups and Subcommittees that address topics of broad interest and solve common problems.

Research Communities are organized around key scientific and engineering challenges and represent an opportunity for the NNCI to interact with the broader research ecosystem. A flagship event for the NNCI network is an annual NNCI Conference that will highlight the research supported by the individual sites, as well as provide a venue for site staff to share best practices and research trends.

An External Advisory Board provides input on network management issues and future directions. Education and outreach activities are coordinated across the network to share and disseminate best practices and resources for impactful programs at the local, regional, and national levels. Network and multi-site programs include those for undergraduates (REU) and teachers (RET).

Societal and ethical implications programs, such as an annual retreat and workshops, enable social scientists to interact with nanoscale scientists, engineers, and students so that all groups can consider the potential impacts new discoveries might have on society. Computational modeling and simulation needs of the user community are supported through an inventory of available resources and collaboration with the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), as well as a planned seminar series.

Innovation and entrepreneurship activities, such as a speaker series, undergraduate education, and entrepreneur-in-residence programs, provide a means for realizing the economic and societal benefits of NNCI resources and expertise. Assessment of the strength of the sites and the network as a whole are determined through metrics developed in collaboration with the sites and are based on site usage, site productivity and impact, contributions to the network, and education and outreach activity.

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.