ABOUT FMMI

FMMI at the University of South Florida is devoted to interdisciplinary fundamental and manufacturing research and education on materials which have the potential to solve significant problems in energy, sustainability, human health, and national security. FMMI is a collaborative institute with faculty members and researchers from the sciences, engineering, and medicine. Educational activities include an interdisciplinary MS program and a certificate program in materials science and engineering. Outreach activities involving K-12 activities, undergraduate research, and teacher-training programs are also integrated into the fabric of FMMI vision, and are central to the rationale for establishing this institute.

The overall research goals of FMMI are to take bottom-up and top-down approaches that exploit interactions among atoms, molecules and larger building blocks, and their manufacturing processes, to address the grand challenge of materials science--- that of designing and modifying materials to tune and create new functionalities, and processes for their efficient manufacture. Fundamental to the FMMI approach is the addressing of each problem together by theoretical/computational and experimental investigators from natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics, working in an open, shared environment. The institute is especially focused on breakthrough research in additive manufacturing and scaling up the synthesis/manufacture of materials requiring process understanding and control at nanometer length scales.