Purdue University announced Tuesday that some of its researchers won a five-year, $14.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to expand the school’s online gateway for instruction, research and simulations in nanotechnology.

The nanoHUB.org portal already attracts nearly 250,000 users each year, and it provides instructional segments used by 760 classes at 185 universities around the world.

The new funding will be used to expand nanoHUB’s resources for running simulations based on experimental data, for offering courses in nanotechnology to train new workers in the field, and to bring in even more users to participate in the nanoHUB community.

"Thousands of times a day the leading researchers 'come' to Purdue through the globally unique tool of nanoHUB," Purdue President Mitch Daniels said in a prepared statement. "The new NSF investment is an affirmation of the brilliance of nanoHUB's Purdue creators and of its worldwide scientific significance."

Purdue’s has started to build off of nanoHUB to provide more online instruction to students at other universities, potentially creating a new revenue stream at a time when state support for higher education has not kept pace with inflation.

The National Science Foundation helped launch nanHUB with a $10.5 million grant to Purdue and five other universities in 2002. That money was used to create the Network for Computational Nanotechnology and the nanoHUB content.

The National Science Foundation also gave a $3.5 million grant to the University of Illinois.

The Purdue researchers behind nanoHUB are Gerhard Klimeck, Krishna Madhavan, Michael McLennan, Lynn Zentner and Michael Zentner.