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Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (MI-06) today announced that the University of Michigan will receive $23,230,881 over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead a new Science and Technology Center (STC). STCs conduct world-class research through partnerships among institutions of higher education, national laboratories, industrial organizations and other public or private entities, and via international collaborations, as appropriate. They provide a means to undertake groundbreaking investigations between disciplines and highly innovative approaches within disciplines. They also play a fundamental role in engaging, recruiting, retaining and mentoring next generation scientists and engineers from groups underrepresented in STEM.
 
“The University of Michigan continues to be a national leader in the cutting-edge research that is powering and shaping the industries of the future,” Dingell said. “The new Science and Technology Center led by U-M will help us expand our understanding of particle-based matter, which has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of manufacturing, and I’m proud we’re leading this effort here in Southeast Michigan.”
 
“Scientific discovery is the engine that drives human progress and underlies all of the technologies that we benefit from today,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “NSF's Science and Technology Centers enable our most creative scientists and engineers to open new vistas of scientific inquiry and make the discoveries that will keep the U.S. in the forefront of scientific discovery. I am delighted to see the impressive originality in ideas and approaches in these new STCs and know they will have a tremendous impact.”
 
The NSF Center for Complex Particle Systems (COMPASS) will be led by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Northeastern University; University of Southern California; Wayne State University; Chicago State University; North Carolina State University; and Formative Evaluation Research Associates. The "ink" used in advanced manufacturing is shapable and yet consists of diverse, often non-spherical, particles. This "particle-based matter" is the focus of COMPASS, which will bring together a team of theoretical, experimental and computational researchers to develop the science and technology necessary to establish a much deeper understanding of particle-based matter as complex systems. By leveraging the relationship between complexity and functionality, the center aims to ignite a revolution in 3D printing and other forms of additive manufacturing with materials with customizable properties.