Case Western Reserve University Awarded Multimillion-Dollar Science and Technology Center

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that it will establish a prestigious multimillion-dollar research center at Case Western Reserve University, effective August 1. The new NSF Science and Technology Center at Case, named the Center for Layered Polymeric Systems (CLiPS) at the Case School of Engineering, will be a powerful national presence for research at the crossroads of polymer science and engineering with the physical sciences (called "polymers plus"), and for education of a diverse American workforce that can meet the challenges of emerging multidisciplinary polymer-based technologies.
This is the first-ever NSF Science and Technology Center awarded to the university.
CLiPS will receive approximately $19 million from NSF over the first five years. The lifetime of a center is usually 10 years with a total funding of around $40 million. Case and its partners will have the opportunity to reapply after four years to renew funding for CLiPS for a second five-year period.
NSF awards Science and Technology Centers competitively across all disciplines. During this round of competition, out of more than 160 competitors, only six centers were funded. Among the six new centers, CLiPS is the only center to be funded in the physical sciences and engineering. Including the six new centers, there are currently 17 Science and Technology centers operating at academic institutions in the United States.
"Teamwork, strategic planning and implementation, and synergy are key factors in the success of the new NSF Science and Technology Centers," said Nathaniel G. Pitts, director of the NSF Office of Integrative Activities. "Each has multiple partners from different science and engineering sectors, including national and international academia, industry, and federal, state and local government. The partners will enable the centers to take advantage of complex agendas that require special modes of operation. The full diversity of the nation's intellectual talent will be engaged, and the expectation is that new knowledge will be one of the primary products, as will be the development of new instrumentation, new technologies, and future scientists and engineers."
Anne Hiltner, the Herbert Henry Dow Professor of Science and Engineering in Case's department of macromolecular science and engineering, will serve as principal investigator and director of the center.
"We are honored to receive this prestigious award from the National Science Foundation," Hiltner said. "These centers are awarded on a very competitive basis, and only to the top research institutions in the nation. This is confirmation of the research strength at Case and our partner institutions."
According to Hiltner, the goal is for CLiPS to lead the nation with an integrated program of research and education through a distinctive microlayering and nanolayering process created at Case during the last 20 years. This forced-assembly process brings together dissimilar polymers and other materials to produce hierarchical structures that are otherwise unattainable. The CLiPS approach strategically integrates polymer science and engineering with research in nanotechnology, optics, laser physics, membranes, biomedical engineering and other scientific disciplines in the "polymers plus" concept.
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