AccelNet Implementation: International Network For Researching, Advancing and Assessing Materials for Environmental Sustainability (INFRAMES)

The history of civilization is often described by the materials used: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Age of Plastics, and the Silicon Age. Materials shape our architecture and art, transportation, clothing, the way we harness energy, produce and store food, and, most recently, technologies from electronics to medicine. Assessing the sustainability of the materials our society produces is a global challenge.

This AccelNet Implementation-Track project assembles substantial investments in the area of environmental nanotechnology into a coordinated international community of researchers dedicated to the challenge. INFRAMES includes researchers from eighteen U.S. universities associated with the Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology and the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology along with eight on-going European networks (SAbyNa, Gracious, NanoCommons, RiskGONE, NanoInformaTIX, SERENADE, ACENano, and Nanosafety Cluster), and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, and researchers at six synchrotron X-ray facilities in four countries.

INFRAMES provides facilitated access to experimental facilities, expansion of accessible data sets, and the evolution of a common basis for evaluating potential impacts of materials on the environment and human health. INFRAMES activities will vastly expand the network and career paths for students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career researchers by immersion in a diverse culture and innovative system of international convergence science, with international lab rotations, webinars and annual workshop experiences in development of protocols and interoperable informatics platforms and collaborative studies.

These initiatives will ensure continued U.S. engagement and cutting-edge workforce training across the international scientific community in environmental materials technology.

INFRAMES will draw on boundary-spanning methods from the science of team science to build and strengthen collaborations across broad range of expertise, co-creating convergent approaches to perform assessments on materials-related challenges or applications. The five focus areas are: 1) particle-based delivery systems for nutrients and pesticides in agricultural applications; 2) materials used in transportation; 3) advanced materials for resource recovery and water treatment; 4) engineered and incidental bio-particles; and 5) consequences of micro/nano plastics.

In addition to the social infrastructures and communication pathways generated by the network itself, a suite of shared resources will facilitate coordination, including spectroscopy and imaging facilities, mesocosm and ecotoxicity facilities for the investigation of particulate materials in complex systems, informatics platforms for novel materials, and modeling platforms for predicting the fate, behavior, and impacts from particulate materials in the environment. INFRAMES will nurture fundamental advances in understanding of surface interactions, nano-bio behavior, and particle transformations and will accelerate U.S. research activities in the area of assessing the sustainability of materials.

The Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program is designed to accelerate the process of scientific discovery and prepare the next generation of U.S. researchers for multiteam international collaborations. The AccelNet program supports strategic linkages among U.S. research networks and complementary networks abroad that will leverage research and educational resources to tackle grand scientific challenges that require significant coordinated international efforts.

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.