Workshop: Developing Community in Engineered Living Materials; Bozeman, Montana; 13 July 2023

Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) are an emerging class of materials that have additional or unique functionalities resulting from the inclusion of living cells on or within the material. ELMs are expected to provide improved sustainability in material development, manufacturing, and use. For instance, using living cells as (micro)factories would facilitate generation of desirable materials from sustainable inputs, such as the production of biopolymers from simple sugars or waste materials. Currently, the development of ELMs is hindered by limited exchange of findings, ideas, and innovations between academic and industry teams working in this area because ELM programming does not have a dedicated conference. A major challenge is that participants in this new field span many research communities, and thus established conferences only assemble small cross-sections of the ELM community. This grant supports two meetings to bring together ELM community to exchange ideas, challenges, and solutions that move the field forward with the goal of establishing an ELM conference series on an annual or biannual schedule. This grant supports two meetings. The first is an evening meeting adjacent to the Materials Research Society Spring conference to assemble attendees and discuss the priorities for the one-day summer ELM workshop. The second meeting is a one-day workshop which will bring together teams working in ELM research across the fields of materials science, engineering, microbiology, synthetic biology, as well as social, legal and ethical considerations. Academic and industry participants are expected. The workshop will feature invited speakers, small working groups, and moderated discussions to define priority research areas, identify central challenges and potential solutions, and define the needs of this emerging community. 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.