AFOSR-NSF Workshop on Prospects of 3D Bioprinting for Biophysics Design Platforms and Advanced Manufacturing; Washington, DC; September 2025

About This Grant

This award provides funds to support the Workshop on Prospects of 3D Bioprinting for Biophysics Design Platforms and Advanced Manufacturing to be held in the Washington DC area during the early fall of 2025. The workshop will consist of panel presentations and in-depth discussions by leading scholars and researchers. The output from this workshop will be the identification and recommendation of opportunities that push the boundaries of the technology, ensuring its readiness to address the most pressing challenges in biophysical science and biomedical engineering. Topics covered in the workshop are directly relevant to the US Air Force and the advanced manufacturing industry in the country. Further research in this area would generate fundamental, transformational knowledge that enables US Air Force operations to have enhanced sensing and maintain situational awareness. The advanced manufacturing section of the workshop will focus on achieving reproducibility, functionality, and integration with downstream processes for the research community, thereby accelerating advances in the control of complex biophysical systems, biosensors, and sensory systems. The field of 3D bioprinting has rapidly emerged as one of the most transformative technologies in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. By enabling the precise arrangement of cells, biomaterials, and bioactive factors, 3D bioprinting provides unprecedented control over the creation of functional biological tissues and constructs. These advancements have significant implications for fields ranging from elucidating biophysical mechanisms to drug discovery and personalized medicine, offering new tools for replicating complex physiological systems in-vitro. The workshop will last for two and a half days and dive into two critical areas: platform design and advanced manufacturing. The overarching goals of this workshop are to assemble a group of diverse, world-class scientific leaders to: (1) review the progress to date in the field; (2) address challenges in hardware, software, and bioink development, exploring how innovations in platform design can enhance the precision, scalability, and biocompatibility of bioprinting systems, and (3) delve into strategies for scaling bioprinted constructs for the research community and industrial/clinical applications, with a focus on achieving reproducibility, functionality, and integration with downstream processes. 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.