FY25 CIF Winners!

The Ames Office of the Center Chief Technologist (OCCT) is pleased to announce the FY25 Center Innovation Fund (CIF) winners! 

This year, the OCCT received nearly 60 well qualified and highly competitive proposals, making this year’s decision an exceptionally difficult one. Thank you to everyone who proposed, and congratulations to:

Caleb Adams
NeuralGPR: Neural Radiance Tomography for Subsurface Lunar Ice Detection with Ground Penetrating Radar

Edward Balaban
SHERPA: Robust Precomputed Autonomy (RPA) Module

Egle Cekanaviciute
GEAR3: Genetically Engineered Automatable Real-time cell Radiation Reporters

Jason Cornelius
Surrogate-based Design Optimization for a Long-Range Mars Rotorcraft

Lara Lash
Unsteady Pressure-Sensitive Paint (uPSP) for Evaluating Capsule Dynamic Stability

Joseph Schulz
Enhancing TPS Material Characterization for Improved Margin Quantification

Michael Khasin
Dynamic Model Reduction for Battery Repurposing in Human Space Flights

Jessica Lee
Luminescent Module Integrating Novel Analytes (LUMINA): A Computational Platform for Tunable Biomolecule Detection

Apsara Mitra
Lunar Operations Coordination (LOC) to enable Lunar Traffic Management and Surface Exploration

Jeremy Frank
Autonomous Distributed Mars Position, Navigation, and Timing

Jason Saied
Photonic Quantum Computing for Autonomous Navigation and Planning

Morgan Gilmour
Windybird: Animal-borne Wind Velocity Measurements at the Planetary Boundary Layer

Daniel Rasky
Strong Thermoset Regolith UV-Curable Composite Technology (STRUCT)

Lynn Rothschild
An Off Planet Laundromat

Marcus Murbach
BrainStack-2: Orbital Lab for AI/ML Processors – first flight of the NASA High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) Platform

Check back in early March 2025 for the anticipated release of the FY26 CIF Request for Proposals (RFP).

Questions regarding the Ames CIF Program should be directed to Jill Bauman at jill.bauman@nasa.gov.