The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) has received an $8 million award from the National Science Foundation to establish the Nebraska Center for 3D Innovation (NE3D), a statewide hub for developing 3D printed healthcare technology. The funding comes through NSF’s E-RISE program (Research Incubators for STEM Excellence), part of the agency’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

NE3D will be based at UNO’s Biomechanics Research Building, but the award is structured to fund a network rather than a single lab: it links UNO with the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of Nebraska Medical Center and its UNMC iEXCEL simulation program, Children’s Hospital & Medical Center’s Mammel Innovation Center, School District 145, the Autism Action Partnership, the 3D Printing and Training Center at Clarkson College, Metropolitan Community College‘s Prototype Design Lab, and industry partner Shabri LLC.

Logos of the participating institutions and companies. Image via University of Nebraska at Omaha.

From a small research group to a funded center

NE3D isn’t a new idea, it’s a decade-old one that just found its funding. UNO’s Jorge Zuniga, Ph.D., started the initiative in 2016 with a small group of scientists and academics, and it has grown into the collaboration the NSF is now backing at statewide scale.

“What makes NE3D particularly important is that it combines these research areas with education, workforce development, and industry partnerships,” says Zuniga.

The center will concentrate on three research areas: 3D printed prosthetics and assistive devices designed to be more human-like and responsive; antimicrobial 3D printing materials aimed at reducing harmful microbes; and patient-specific anatomical models and surgical planning tools that combine AI, medical imaging, and 3D printing. 

Beyond the research itself, NE3D will run mentored, interdisciplinary projects for graduate, undergraduate, and high school students in fields spanning biomechanics and soft robotics, computer-aided design and prototyping, prosthetic and assistive-device development, medical imaging, and AI-enhanced medical technologies.

“The long-term goal is not simply to produce individual technologies. It is to build research capacity in Nebraska so that researchers, students, clinicians, educators, and industry partners have the infrastructure and collaborative network needed to develop the next generation of healthcare technologies.”

Part of a track record, not a standing start

NE3D is built on top of work Zuniga’s lab has been doing for over a decade. In 2014, he designed Cyborg Beast, a low-cost 3D printed prosthetic hand for children with upper-limb differences, and released the design online for free rather than commercializing it. 

That project led to a multi-university follow-on grant in 2017, when researchers from UNO, UNMC, UNL, and the University of Nebraska at Kearney set out to design a 3D printed arm prosthesis that would cost less than $50 in materials, aimed at the roughly 1,500 babies born each year in the U.S. with upper-limb defects who often go without a prosthesis because of cost.

That work now runs out of UNO’s Additive Manufacturing Laboratory inside the Biomechanics Research Building, a roughly 675-square-foot general workspace plus a separate 224-square-foot room dedicated to metal 3D printing, already funded in part by NIH and NASA grants for prosthetics, orthoses, and medical-grade antimicrobial polymers. 

The lab has also built a clinical bridge: in 2021, Omaha prosthetics and orthotics provider Innovative Prosthetics and Orthotics became an on-site partner after its founder went looking for a way to make prosthetic components affordable at scale and was pointed to Zuniga’s research. NE3D’s $8 million doesn’t start that infrastructure, it scales a lab, a set of grants, and a clinical partnership that already existed into a formal, statewide research center.

Jorge M. Zuniga, Ph.D, helps Rue Gillespie put on her prosthesis before she is run through a series of tests. Photo via Ryan Soderlin/UNO.

Funding the infrastructure, not just the project

NE3D’s $8 million reflects a specific funding strategy: rather than backing one experiment, NSF is paying to turn an existing research group into standing infrastructure, facilities, a multi-institution network, and a student pipeline that will keep producing results long after this particular grant cycle ends. 

Similar efforts have arisen across the industry. NSF gave a grant to UC Santa Barbara, where a new grant opens up two-photon polymerization 3D nanoprinting, a process historically locked behind commercial foundries, to researchers across five academic disciplines at once, treating shared access as the deliverable rather than one lab’s project.

On a larger scale, the National Institutes of Health funds a $6.25 million multi-institution center spanning Rice University, the University of Maryland, and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, so scaffold fabrication, tissue engineering, and clinical application work could develop together under one funded network instead of in separate, disconnected labs.

The pattern is the same one behind NE3D: federal funders increasingly treat 3D printing capability itself, the labs, the training, the institutional partnerships, as the thing worth investing in, not just whatever device or paper comes out of a single grant cycle.

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Featured image shows Jorge M. Zuniga, Ph.D, helps Rue Gillespie put on her prosthesis before she is run through a series of tests. Photo via Ryan Soderlin/UNO.