Participant Support for Workshop on Advanced Manufacturing of Ceramic and Composite Materials for Extreme Environments; College Station, Texas; Fall 2026

This grant provides funding to partially support approximately 20 early-career researchers (including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career faculty) to participate in the Workshop on Advanced Manufacturing of Ceramic and Composite Materials for Extreme Environments, to be held in Fall 2026 in College Station, Texas. The workshop will convene a cross-disciplinary community spanning advanced manufacturing, ceramic and composite processing, densification science, modeling and sensing, and extreme-environment performance and qualification. It will produce a publicly available workshop report that will identify high-priority scientific challenges and outline coordinated opportunities to accelerate reliable manufacturing of ceramic and composite materials for extreme-environment applications. Support from the National Science Foundation will enable participation of early-career researchers who might otherwise be unable to take part in the workshop. These early-career researchers will gain access to mentorship, networking, and visibility, strengthening the workforce pipeline in advanced manufacturing of ceramic and composite materials for extreme environments. The workshop report will be disseminated openly to the broader community, helping align research directions, accelerate translation of reliable ceramic and composite manufacturing technologies, and strengthen United States competitiveness in aerospace, energy, defense, and other sectors that rely on materials for harsh conditions. Recruitment and selection for travel support include outreach to universities, national laboratories, and companies. Engagement of these early-career researchers will continue through post-workshop working groups that foster continued collaboration. Advanced manufacturing (including additive manufacturing) of ceramics and composite materials can enable complex, lightweight components for extreme environments, but widespread adoption is limited by coupled process–structure–property challenges. Across multiple additive manufacturing methods, reliability is often controlled by defect formation and evolution, such as green-body damage, cracking and distortion induced during binder removal and sintering, retained porosity or incomplete densification, and interfacial flaws. These defects can lead to large scatter in mechanical performance and durability under thermal gradients, oxidation, corrosion, wear, and cyclic loading. Addressing these challenges requires integrated approaches that connect feedstock and process design to densification kinetics, residual stress development, and defect-sensitive failure mechanisms. The workshop will advance knowledge in this area by convening experts across processing science, modeling and sensing, and extreme-environment performance to synthesize knowledge gaps, define prioritized research questions, and discuss validation needs that can accelerate development of shared datasets, model verification, and reproducible manufacturing strategies. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2619981 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Zhijian Pei | Institution: Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, COLLEGE STATION, TX | Award Amount: $10,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2619981 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2619981.html