New Frontiers Grant Program Successes for RASEI Fellows

The CU Boulder New Frontiers Grant Program was launched in 2024. The program is designed to foster visionary groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research projects that have potential for high impact. This could include significant advances in knowledge, problem-solving or innovation that can build to new paradigms of understanding.

A central column of this program is to stimulate the development of new strengths at CU Boulder, driven by researchers thinking across disciplines and developing methods to work together to tackle complex and impactful research challenges.

Twenty-six teams submitted collaborative proposals were submitted to this program earlier this year and four projects were selected as winners of planning grants, two of which involved RASEI Fellows.

New Frontiers in Bio-Integrated Organic Computing & Low-Energy Innovative Carbon-based Manufacturing, or BIO-CLIC, led by RASEI Fellow Jeff Cameron and engaging a team across four CU Boulder departments and collaborators from NREL, will explore challenges in computational efficiency by investigating unconventional computing approaches that employ renewable sources and carbon fixation processes.

Polymers for a Sustainable Earth, or POSE, led by Wei Zhang from the Department of Chemistry and involving RASEI Fellows Dan Kaffine, Kat Knauer, Oana Luca, Seth Marder, Srinivas Parinandi, Mike Toney, and Terri Walters, brings together collaborators from six CU Boulder departments and NREL. POSE will foster a community to facilitate extramural research and funding at a scale to effectively address the issue of plastic pollution and new, sustainable methods to synthesize, reuse, and recycle polymers.

The four teams were chosen following 14 in-person pitches, where the teams outlined how their proposed work addresses important societal problems through adopting collaborative interdisciplinary approaches. The four teams will now use the next year to advance their proposals, build out the team and conduct initial investigations on how to take things forward. The teams will then compete for the single Launch Phase Grant of $200k, which will be awarded in June 2025.

Congratulations to the teams! We look forward to seeing your progress over the next year!