NSF Seeks Paradigm-Shifting Results Through New TRAILBLAZER Program

Last week, the National Science Foundation announced the first grants from the Trailblazer Engineering Impact Award (TRAILBLAZER) program, which will fund especially creative and unconventional engineering projects.

Unlike typical NSF-funded grants, Trailblazer projects must take a direction distinct from researchers’ previous work, using “potentially paradigm-shifting leaps and hypotheses.” Accordingly, the program application makes no request for preliminary data or detailed experimental plans.

“This is an inaugural program to enable researchers to pursue novel engineering projects. Not the regular run-of-the-mill, as important as they are, but thinking outside the box,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said at a meeting of NSF’s governing board in July. “Something that will be thought of as, ‘Oh, it’s not possible.’”

The program aligns with agency priorities expressed at the meeting, where Chair Darío Gil emphasized the importance of patient government funding for basic research even before practical applications are realized.

The program divided $18 million among six three-year projects that span several scientific fields, including quantum technology, thermodynamics, biotechnology, and sustainability.

Among the project leads is Deyu Li at Vanderbilt University, who will seek to demonstrate a novel approach for super-efficient radiative cooling mediated by phonon polaritons, a type of energy carrier that results from coupling between infrared light and vibrations of polar molecules in solids.

“NSF is investing quite significantly and without preliminary data. It’s high-risk, high-reward. And it’s important to make sure that the PI is doing solid research and has a track record of making important discoveries,” Li said in an interview.

The Trailblazer funding announcement came at a good time for Li, he said, as he has not done research on thermal radiation before.

He originally discovered that coating the end of a silicon carbide nanowire with a short segment of gold enabled launching of many more surface phonon polaritons than the corresponding equilibrium values, allowing the uncoated wire to conduct more heat. Extrapolating these findings from conduction to radiation, he now hypothesizes that it is possible for the energy carriers to mediate a much higher radiative heat transfer rate than the blackbody limit set by Planck’s Law.

Li also plans to partially embed the nanowire arrays in metal surfaces and assess their cooling effects on attached solar panels and LEDs to minimize overheating that reduces lifetime and efficiency. Super-efficient cooling would also aid heat management for data centers and microelectronic devices and could even aid in daily life by passively cooling buildings in hot climates.

Most major grants would have required another year’s worth of preliminary studies and other pilot funding would be substantially smaller, Li said.

“This award really allows me to start this earlier and do it at full speed, instead of performing a lot of preliminary tests and not putting this highly interesting research at the top priority,” Li said.