This grant provides financial support for the workshop entitled, "NSF Convergence Accelerator: Re-think Nature for Innovative Solutions to Grand Challenges", to be held virtually in the Fall 2020. The workshop will bring together and expand collaboration among key stakeholders from academia, industry, and government with the charge of exploring grand challenges for the future of humanity and planet by leveraging nature-inspired solutions. The workshop will focus on three areas: (1) nature-inspired solutions to petroleum-based plastics, (2) natural material-based solutions to clean water, and (3) advanced materials for sustainable infrastructure. The proposed workshop will explore sustainable and nature-abundant materials by synthesizing new ideas, approaches, and technologies from diverse fields of knowledge to achieve scientific breakthroughs and exceptional innovation, with the ultimate goal to seek innovative solutions to grand challenges. By successfully integrating diverse disciplines in chemistry, materials science, engineering, data sciences, plant science, and public policy, the proposed convergence approach is poised to achieve cutting-edge discoveries in nature-abundant resources and unprecedented innovation in sustainable utilization of natural materials toward a wide range of potential applications. For example, newly discovered properties of wood-sourced materials could be exploited for more sustainable and in many cases superior materials for products and processes that directly impact society, which is an excellent example of re-thinking nature-inspired solutions for humans and the planet. While tremendous research possibilities exist, center to these opportunities is use-inspired convergence and building partnerships to transition discoveries into practice. The objective of this workshop is to review the recent progress and identify new directions and opportunities ripe for convergence research. Funding from this grant will go towards web hosting services for the workshop, and personnel support for organizing the workshop as well as the production of a report.
In this virtual workshop, invited leaders, researchers, innovators, and stake-holders with a diverse range of disciplinary expertise from across academia, government, and industry will discuss present and future challenges and opportunities for convergence related to nature-inspired solutions to grand challenges. The workshop will be comprised of three tracks, with a mixed format of invited talks, lightning talks, break out groups, and moderated discussions. The format is intended to foster brain-storming discussions around the most important technical challenges in each topic and opportunities for future convergence research. This workshop will also feature panel discussions that will integrate the topics and discussions from the three sessions. The outcome of these presentations and discussions will be documented in a final report and will be widely disseminated across academia, government, and industry.
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.
