The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.
Microbes have co-evolved over millions of years and assembled in highly optimized microbial communities (microbiomes). Over the last several decades scientists have begun to discover the power microbiomes harness and how microbiomes could be leveraged to benefit society. While some successes have been achieved in translating the growing fundamental scientific knowledge linking microbiomes to practical applications, in general, a systematic and replicable framework is needed for consistently bridging the gap between fundamental scientific discovery and technology development. This planning grant will create the visionary platform and collaborative network to establish an Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) that will enable engineers, microbiologists and other natural scientists to work alongside theorists, model builders and computational scientists to develop integrative models that will serve as the foundation for engineering discovery and application to develop a broad range of technologies designed to address global challenges in agriculture, environment, health and energy. PreMiEr's research activities will enable microbiome manipulation to promote beneficial microbes such as those that restore ecological function by degrading toxic soil pollutants, improving crop yield by increasing stress tolerance, decreasing our reliance on fossil fuel by producing biofuels and weakening undesirable microbes such as those that destroy crops and contribute to disease. PreMiEr will shift microbiome research from a descriptive to a predictive framework, a shift which is key to advancing microbiome engineering, promoting engineering innovation and facilitating research translation. Furthermore, by incorporating social scientists into the PreMiEr research framework, non-social scientists' work will be informed by consideration of the ethical and policy implications of their evolving microbiome engineering discoveries. Creation and integration of these activities will result in an accelerated research translation process designed to speed up bench to market time.
This planning grant combines Core Vision Leadership Team brainstorming and integration meetings with four catalytic accelerator workshops, mapped to PreMiEr's four research themes (Environment, Agriculture, Health and Energy) which will deliver a transdisciplinary research and societal impacts agenda and identify the broader team partners and expertise that is critical to the formation and success of this Center. The expected benefits of the planning activities include: 1) crystallizing PreMiEr's engineering research themes, thrusts and cores; 2) defining a transformative agenda designed to advance microbiome research from descriptive to mechanistic to application studies; 3) creating structure for successful translation of PreMiEr's research; 4) defining critical societal impacts linked with an assessment plan that incorporates evolving international standards on relevant societal impact indicators; and 5) designing an inclusive PreMiEr training structure to broaden STEM participation and enhance domestic and global workforce development. PreMiEr's research design, informed by research-stakeholder team input, will directly impact society?s ability to supply food, energy and clean water while maintaining and improving the health of our population and ecosystems. In addition, through active recruitment of trainees from underrepresented groups and expanded collaborative partnerships with HBCUs and MSIs, PreMiEr will contribute to broadening diversity across the US STEM workforce and training the next generation in interdisciplinary technical and professional skills to compete in the emerging arena of convergence science. Finally, the translation of this planning initiative into a proposed engineering research center will provide a model for the development of other future convergence science centers.
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.
