About NanoKnow^™

Connecting nanofabrication knowledge, data, and expertise through AI.

NanoKnow is a nonprofit initiative working to make nanofabrication knowledge and data easier to preserve, discover, share, and use. We bring together facilities, researchers, students, staff, and community partners to address the fragmentation of knowledge across institutions.

Today, valuable information is scattered across documents, websites, internal folders, equipment records, process data, staff experience, and informal conversations. NanoKnow is building the AI and data infrastructure needed to connect these resources while preserving their context, attribution, and relationship to the facilities, tools, and people that created them.

We aim to connect knowledge with process data, tools, facilities, training, and community expertise—using AI to uncover relationships, preserve institutional memory, reduce duplicated effort, and accelerate scientific and technical work.

What NanoKnow^™ Does

Our first platform, NanoKnow Commons, creates a shared home for nanofabrication documents, practical knowledge, training resources, and expertise. It uses AI-assisted search and cited question answering to help people browse, find, and understand information across a growing community-built collection.

Shared Knowledge Base

Bring together SOPs, process notes, manuals, training materials, troubleshooting guides, equipment documentation, and data in one searchable knowledge base.

Structured Metadata

Connect knowledge to tools, processes, materials, facilities, contributors, and context so information can be organized, attributed, and reused.

AI-Assisted Discovery

Use intelligent agentic search and retrieval to help users find relevant fabrication knowledge faster — with cited sources and clear provenance so results can be trusted and traced back to their origin.

Why NanoKnow^™?

Turning scattered nanofabrication knowledge into shared progress.

Nanofabrication facilities generate enormous practical knowledge every day — how to train users, operate tools, develop processes, troubleshoot failures, and support complex research. But much of this knowledge remains local and difficult to find: scattered across internal documents, websites, folders, manuals, staff experience, and informal conversations.

Across the national nanofabrication ecosystem, many facilities face similar challenges. When knowledge is hard to access, even within a single facility, staff and researchers spend valuable time rebuilding documentation, repeating process development, and solving problems that others have already encountered.

NanoKnow helps change this by creating an open, AI-enabled platform for organizing and sharing fabrication knowledge across institutions. By making documentation, training resources, process expertise, and troubleshooting insight easier to discover and reuse, NanoKnow can help accelerate research, improve training, reduce duplicated effort, and support the transition from academic discovery to real-world technology development.

Participating Facilities

Partnering to advance nanofabrication knowledge.

The facilities shown here represent early collaborators and knowledge contributors helping demonstrate NanoKnow’s vision for shared nanofabrication knowledge. NanoKnow welcomes interest from additional facilities, institutions, researchers, staff, and community partners. To explore participation, contribute resources, or receive updates, please register your interest through the Join page at the link below.

Get Involved