RESEARCH APPROACH AND METHODOLOGIES
As a result of the highly competitive and dynamic nature of materials technology, of the clear need to create a balanced infrastructure for materials science, engineering, technology and human resources development, and of the potentially immense return on investment, the time appears right for the nation to establish a significant R&D initiative to support Center of Excellence for Research in Engineering Materials (CEREM). The promises of CEREM can best be realized through long term and balanced investment in four R&D categories in particular:
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Synthesis and processing:
Enable the control of materials and develop engineering tools to provide the means to assemble and utilize tailored building blocks for new processes and devices in a wide variety of applications. Extend the traditional approaches to patterning and microfabrication to include parallel processing with proximal probes, selfassembling, stamping, and templating;
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Characterization and manipulation:
Discover and develop new experimental tools to broaden the capability to measure and control materials, including developing new standards of measurement. Pay particular attention to tools capable of measuring/manipulating single macro- and supra-molecules of biological interest;
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Modeling and simulation:
Accelerate the application of novel concepts and high-performance computation to the prediction of materials properties, phenomena, and processes