5

Conclusion and List of All Report Recommendations

This quadrennial review has described a new orientation for the U.S. nanotechnology enterprise, one that centers on renewing and expanding the instruments, equipment, facilities, and workforce central for converting intellectual capital into economic and social gains for the nation. The United States is in an excellent position to tackle this challenge. Twenty years ago, the United States had the foresight to direct billions of dollars into nanotechnology research and development before any other country, becoming the global leader in this emerging area of research. Resulting advances in science and technology have found their way into applications in therapeutics, batteries, microelectronics, and many other sectors that impact the daily lives of Americans. However, the United States is just at the beginning of realizing the economic and social benefits of its investment.

To lead the next chapter of nanotechnology, it is vital that the United States develop the world’s most capable and accessible nanotechnology infrastructure. Its state-of-the-art tools and expert staff will enable diverse users, even those not specialized in nanotechnology, to shape, discover, and characterize nanoscale matter. Much like the interstate highway system, the infrastructure envisioned here will serve everyone—students, scholars, entrepreneurs, teachers, and researchers from large and small companies alike. Its capabilities will span a broad intellectual map as well, addressing the needs of distinct disciplines as well as federal agencies. This job is too large in scale, and crosses too many sectors, to be delegated to any one agency or one sector.

It is critical that the United States act swiftly and decisively. As described in the 2020 Quadrennial Review, there is an ongoing global race for research leadership in

nanotechnology, and the competition for extracting economic, societal, and national security value from nanotechnology’s advances is equally fierce. This review offers recommendations that will ensure that the United States retains its leadership role—both in the scholarship of nanotechnology as well as in its application.

Defining and actively managing our existing nanotechnology infrastructure portfolio is a critical first step. Over the past 20 years, federal agencies have supported a wide range of nanotechnology instruments and tools, as well as the personnel who maintain and train in user accessible settings. The United States is fortunate to have this patchwork of different user facilities, some currently funded through clear federal directives and others the legacy of past nanotechnology programs. This eclectic mix of resources, however, requires ongoing tracking as well as management to ensure it is fully leveraged.

As the committee discusses in Chapter 1, it is essential that the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO) cast a wide net when capturing these shared resources and include university as well as state-operated facilities. There are also many operational models and technical capabilities within this existing nanotechnology infrastructure. National coordination is thus essential in order to harmonize and relate these disparate investments.

Any management of this resource will require a set of common measures to assess information, such as user demand and facility operating capacity. Information gathering for this review, for example, was challenging because the disparate types of data from different facilities was not easily compared, limiting any comprehensive view of the current national nanotechnology infrastructure.

The second step is to direct resources toward both the renewal and expansion of the nation’s nanotechnology infrastructure. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) was developed to ensure U.S. leadership in an emerging research discipline whose future was then uncertain. Nanotechnology is a far more defined endeavor than it was at the start of the NNI. However, as detailed in Chapter 3, it remains highly relevant both in its commercial translation as well as in its continued importance to emerging areas such as quantum science and agricultural research. The multidisciplinary nature and wide-ranging application of nanotechnology, however, means that multiple agencies continue to support the research that makes a cross-agency coordinating office, the NNCO, of ongoing importance, particularly with respect to infrastructure.

Because much of the U.S. nanotechnology infrastructure is now more than a decade old, it is vital to make strategic investments in its preservation and renewal.

Infrastructure is far more than buildings and capital equipment. It is important to also include professional staff dedicated to facility management, user training, instrument maintenance, and new instrument development.

While the United States has a good starting point for nanotechnology infrastructure, future success will depend on the expansion of this infrastructure. As

described in Chapter 3, nanotechnology has profound relevance to many new research areas of critical national importance. Researchers in these areas will become future users and their needs are important considerations to inspire innovations in tools that become part of the nanotechnology infrastructure.

Many of these emerging use cases are highly interdisciplinary and engage multiple federal agencies. It is important that the NNCO convene the different communities to ensure that expansions in the nanotechnology infrastructure are complementary to existing capabilities and are well aligned with the needs of emerging areas.

The third and last step is to ensure that the nanotechnology infrastructure is highly accessible. The next chapter of nanotechnology has broad educational and commercial relevance to the nation. If the first two decades of nanotechnology were about defining and developing nanotechnology specialists, the next two decades will build on this by making the tools and concepts of nanotechnology available to all. It is important that facilities are available to anyone with an interest in nanotechnology research, development, or commercialization. The U.S. interstate highways were designed for maximal accessibility and set up without tolls and along familiar existing routes. Similarly, the nanotechnology infrastructure needs to accessible in terms of geography, access policies, cost, and practicality.

To ensure that the new nanotechnology infrastructure is built for accessibility, it is important to measure and hold sites accountable to this goal. Existing measures reported by nanotechnology infrastructure facilities emphasize the quantity and impact of peer-reviewed publications. The next phase of nanotechnology infrastructure has to have a broader view of success that includes improving the user base with respect to institutional status, geography, and sector. Tracking these and other standardized measures can inform and assess local strategies for broadening access to sites.

While stakeholders reported many challenges in accessing the U.S. nanotechnology infrastructure, nearly all of them agreed that costs associated with travel to infrastructure sites is a significant impediment to access.

Remote access is not widely considered to be a solution for broadening access to nanotechnology infrastructure. The benefits of hands-on training in both instrument operation and data analysis are critically important, particularly for less experienced users. However, monitoring remote access technologies and offering this option, particularly for more experienced users, is important given the rapid advances in this area.

FULL LIST OF RECOMMENDATIONS

Priority Recommendations

Recommendation 1.1: In the coming year, the National Nanotechnology Coordinating Office (NNCO) should conduct a census of accessible nanotechnology infrastructure sites (instruments, staff, facilities) and display findings on a public, web-accessible map that includes university, regional, and national resources. This information, which should be maintained annually by NNCO, will enhance the visibility, availability, and impact of these assets.

Recommendation 1.2: Within 2 years, Congress should reauthorize the National Nanotechnology Initiative as the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure and orient, with the appropriate funding, the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office and agency activity toward the renewal and expansion of infrastructure to serve existing and emerging nanotechnology research and development.

Recommendation 2.4: Within the next 2 years, the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office should undertake a study to determine the level of resources needed to maintain state-of-the-art nanotechnology infrastructure. The study should include a timeframe, measures of success and efficiency, and accountability measures.

Recommendation 3.3: Federal agencies that support nanotechnology infrastructure should within the next year, and periodically thereafter, prioritize investment in new capabilities that advance fabrication, materials synthesis, characterization and data analysis to support emerging technologies to help the United States maintain its commercial edge.

Recommendation 4.1: All agencies that fund nanotechnology infrastructure should include in their infrastructure evaluations measures of performance that capture the breadth and heterogeneity of the associated user bases.

Recommendation 4.5: All agencies that fund nanotechnology infrastructure should increase program funding or provide a competitive travel grant program to include dedicated travel support for users, and where feasible, summer access for academics, researchers, and students who are not from R1 institutions.

Additional Recommendations

Recommendation 2.1: The National Nanotechnology Coordination Office should continue to annually convene key stakeholders in nanotechnology infrastructure to share best practices, coordinate agency investments, and ensure all facilities have a common connection.

Recommendation 2.2: Within 2 years, the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office should create and then maintain a facilities reporting and user metrics database for all nanotechnology infrastructure that is streamlined, standardized, and eventually automated.

Recommendation 2.3: Any assessment of maintaining the nanotechnology infrastructure should be informed by the depreciated cost and accumulated devaluation of capital equipment, and these data should inform future infrastructure investments made by National Nanotechnology Initiative–supporting agencies.

Recommendation 2.5: Federal agencies that support nanotechnology infrastructure should, within 2 years, offer infrastructure funding that includes mechanisms to provide professional staff support.

Recommendation 3.1: The National Nanotechnology Coordination Office should develop infrastructure gap analyses through annual workshops that engage researchers in relevant emerging areas with nanotechnology infrastructure experts.

Recommendation 3.2: The National Nanotechnology Coordination Office should coordinate and communicate with the National Quantum Coordination Office, the CHIPS Research and Development Office, and the Microelectronics Commons program—all of which have an interest in the scope, size, and support of nanofabrication and nanocharacterization capabilities and access in the United States.

Recommendation 4.2: The National Nanotechnology Coordination Office should convene nanotechnology infrastructure site leaders and outreach directors regularly and assist in gathering and promoting evidence-backed best practices to increase awareness of resources in potential user populations and ultimately achieve broader usage.

Recommendation 4.3: Within 6 months, federal agencies that fund nanotechnology infrastructure should provide guidance that remote access should complement in-person visits; however, hands-on and onsite training should be prioritized for new users.

Recommendation 4.4: The Department of Energy should within a year conduct a review of its intellectual property agreements at its nanotechnology infrastructure facilities and endeavor to bring them more in line with the successful agreements used at the National Science Foundation facilities, which may lower barriers to utilization of their facilities by industry and startup companies.