Dear AFRL-RNMA Community,

Welcome to the Q3 edition of the AFRL Regional Network – Mid-Atlantic newsletter. The Network continues to make great progress and have measurable impact and we are thrilled to share the results of the largest funding cycle in our history. In September, the Network awarded $2.4 million to 12 exceptional project teams through the Fall 2026 Partnership Funding Cycle. Every winning team is building on a project the Network has funded before, i.e. all projects were Stage 2 or 3 awards. These proven teams were provided follow up resources to carry their technologies closer to real missions and real markets, furthering our mission to bridge groundbreaking ideas with practical, dual-use applications.

With this cycle, the Network has now deployed approximately $10.5 million across 73 project awards since 2022, a testament to the depth of innovation across our membership.

As some of you know, the AFRL Regional Network – Mid-Atlantic (RNMA) is preparing for a planned transition between federal funding cycles. Current AFRL funding will support Network operations through August 2027, and we anticipate funding via the federal FY2028 budget that will start October 1, 2027. A Request for Proposals (RFP) is expected in spring 2028 and a new contract anticipated that summer. To bridge this transition, we are actively developing strategies to maintain the Network’s infrastructure, preserving the strong foundation and momentum we have established across the region.

During this period, new project funding cycles will be temporarily paused, but our commitment to supporting the Network and fostering collaboration among its members remains unchanged. We are encouraged by the opportunities ahead and look forward to sharing additional details about our plans for sustaining Network activities in the coming months.

This quarter also brings a change to our leadership team. Dr. John Luginsland, our AFRL Collaboration Director since March 2024, departed the Network at the end of September to take a new position with the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation. In addition to his sound counsel, John reviewed and approved every project we have funded during his tenure, and we could not have asked for a stronger slate to close out his time with us. We share a proper farewell, along with a few words from John himself, later in this issue.

In this issue, we are pleased to share:

• Results of the Fall 2026 Partnership Funding Cycle
• A farewell to Collaboration Director John Luginsland
• A look at the liquid metal robots taking shape at Nereis

Thank you, as always, for the continued collaboration and innovation that make this Network thrive.

Warmest regards,

Emmanuel Giannelis & Patrick Govang

Co-Directors, AFRL Regional Network – Mid-Atlantic

In September, the Network’s five-member selection committee of senior AFRL scientists and outside experts from industry and technology licensing met to review proposals submitted during the Fall 2026 Partnership Funding Cycle. After reviewing 19 proposals, the committee recommended 12 projects for funding, a total of $2.3 million in new project funding and the largest single round of awards in the Network’s history.

Every winning team is building on a previously funded Network project, and each will receive up to $200,000 in Stage 2 or Stage 3 funding to carry a proven innovation closer to commercial markets and Air Force and Space Force missions. All 12 projects align with the Network’s modernization themes of quantifying performance in extreme environments, complex systems and modeling, and edge computing, and work will run from November 1, 2026 through May 31, 2027.

The strength of the proposals made the committee’s decisions genuinely difficult, which is a good problem for a network to have. We thank the selection committee members for their time and expertise, and we thank every team that submitted this cycle. We are working to initiate contracts for the awarded projects promptly.

SNOChip, Inc.; Joon-Suh Park: Temperature-Resilient, Lightweight, Large Format Achromatic Silicon Metalenses for SWIR/MWIR Imaging

Datalytica, LLC; Misty Blowers: REVEAL: Reconfigurable Evaluation and Validation Environment for AI-Enabled Lifecycles

EchoICs Inc.; Thomas Tapen: Adapting Jammer Tolerant Software Defined Radio for Low-SWAP FMCW Radar

Skyline Nav AI, Inc.; Kanwar Singh: GPS-Independent Autonomous Navigation for Attritable Platforms Over Low-Texture Areas

Cornell University, Jared Maxson: Analyzing the Output of Portable Electron Accelerators

University of Connecticut, Mihai Duduta: Liquid Metal Guided Robots for Complex Environments

The Pennsylvania State University; Darren Pagan: Stage 2: Robust Microscale Microstructure and Residual Stress Characterization

Drone City, Mehdi Salehi: Autonomous Drone Airdrop and Advanced Stabilization

Forage Evolution, David Specht: Engineered Biological Separation and Transformation of Metals with Vibrio natriegens

PRISAM; Pritam Poddar: Integrated Sensing of Hypervelocity Impact and Outgassing Qualification of PRISAM’s MMOD Shields

University at Albany, SUNY; Dola Saha: AgileWave: Agile Waveform Generation for Communication in Extreme Environments

OWiC Technologies; Paul McEuen: Microsensors for Real-Time Thermoset Processing Telemetry

The Fall 2026 awards carry a bittersweet distinction: they are the final funding cycle reviewed and approved by Dr. John W. Luginsland, who departed the Network at the end of September to join the Virginia Tech Applied Research Corporation.

John joined the Network as AFRL Collaboration Director in March 2024 and shaped it from his first cycle. He guided the strategic direction of Network initiatives, connected AFRL researchers with universities, startups, and corporate partners across the region, and served as the AFRL lead responsible for reviewing and approving every project the Network funds. A plasma physicist with decades of Air Force experience, including service as a Principal Physical Scientist at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, John brought deep scientific judgment to this role, and our members felt the difference in every cycle he touched.

“Serving as Collaboration Director has been a highlight of my career,” John shared as he prepared to depart. “Watching teams across this region take ideas out of the laboratory and push them toward Air Force and Space Force missions has been deeply rewarding, and this is a strong slate of projects to go out on. The Network is in very good hands.”

Please join us in thanking John for his service to the Network, to the Air Force, and to the region. We are grateful for everything he has helped build here, and we wish him every success in what comes next.

This quarter we turn the spotlight to Nereis Inc., a Connecticut robotics company built on technology the Network has funded since 2023.

A steam turbine is an extreme environment twice over. In operation it runs at high temperature and pressure, and shut down for inspection it becomes a tight, dark, geometrically complex space that workers can enter only with scaffolding and strict confined-space protocols, often just to position a handheld instrument.

Nereis is building a small soft robot that does the entering instead. The robot expands an origami body to cross gaps inside the machine, anchors itself with gentle electroadhesive pads, and carries a camera on a thin tether that delivers only power, which lets it avoid the entanglement that has defeated earlier tethered robots in settings like these. Running the length of the body are screen-printed liquid metal traces, flexible wiring that bends and stretches with the robot, and the thread that ties this company back to the Network.

The Network first funded that thread in the Fall 2023 cycle, when a University of Connecticut team earned a Stage 1 award establishing that liquid metal electrodes were feasible for inspection robots. A Stage 2 award from the Spring 2025 cycle, led by UConn Professor Mihai Duduta with AFRL research scientist Dr. Christopher Tabor, developed the electrodes, optics, and navigation the robot now uses and produced the spinout itself. The new Stage 3 project, led by UConn, integrates those proven components into a single machine and measures its performance in turbine-representative geometry.

Safer and faster inspection matters to every utility that owns one of the country’s roughly 1,200 steam turbines, and the Air Force and Space Force face the same confined-space problem inside turbomachinery and airframes. Watching a university laboratory result grow into a startup serving both markets is exactly what this Network was built to do, and we look forward to seeing where Nereis takes the technology from here.