For the last few years, the Molecular Foundry has partnered with the other four Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs) and the leadership at the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a plan for recapitalizing our instrumentation. This large-scale commitment to the future competitiveness of the nanocenters comes in the form of a Major Item(s) of Equipment (MIE) project, which is the same mechanism used for things like ALS-U. Thus far, the project has been approved as a DOE “mission need” and has received funds from Congress to support planning efforts.
At the Foundry, these significant efforts have been led by Jim Ciston, and through his hard work and that of many others, we are excited to announce that the NSRC MIE project has crossed its next significant milestone, Critical Decision 1 or CD-1, as well as CD-3A, which authorizes some of the project’s first procurements. While the timeline is dependent on Congress appropriating funds, this puts the project on track to obtain much needed equipment for the Foundry community in the next few years, including an autonomous synthesis cluster for hard materials, a high-throughput STEM for hard materials, and a multimodal optoelectronic aberration-corrected STEM.
