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 is established to enhance 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 will assist users from academe, industry, and government in finding NNCI fabrication and characterization resources to meet their research needs through an interactive NNCI web portal. It will use the expertise of site staff to facilitate programs in education and outreach, social and ethical implications, and computational modeling and simulation across the network, and help provide linkages with other national and international nanotechnology resources. The overall activities of the NNCI Coordinating Office will contribute to the economic competiveness of the U.S. in training a globally competitive workforce and in providing efficient access to resources for innovation and commercialization of nanotechnology. They will 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 individual NNCI sites, site users, and broader public interests using the combined assets of a nation-wide network of university nanotechnology user facilities. A key component of the Coordinating Office will be the development of mechanisms for communicating availability of network assets to users of the facilities as well as for fostering interactions among the sites. A primary mode for this communication will be an interactive NNCI web portal, which will allow new and existing users to efficiently locate capabilities and expertise within the network, and also provide up-to-date nanotechnology resources to the K-20 communities and broader public. To emphasize the importance of a network of sites, the Coordinating Office will be guided by an Executive Committee with representation from all 16 sites and will organize a number of working groups and committees to address topics of broad interest and solve common problems. A flagship event for the NNCI network will be 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 with the broader nanotechnology community. An External Advisory Board with members selected from the external advisory boards of all sites will provide input on network management issues and future directions. Education and outreach activities will be coordinated across the network to share and disseminate best practices and resources for impactful programs at the local, regional, and national levels. Social and ethical implications programs, such as an annual retreat and conference forums, will 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 will be supported through an inventory of available resources and close collaboration with the existing Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). Assessment of the strength of the sites and the network as a whole will be determined through metrics developed in collaboration with the sites and will be based on site usage, site productivity and technical impact, contributions to the network, and education and outreach activity.
