Europe Needs a New Breed of Materials Scientist, Researchers Warn in Landmark Training Blueprint

A team of European researchers has issued a stark warning: the continent’s ambitious plans to lead the world in advanced materials will falter unless it trains an entirely new generation of professionals who can think across disciplines at once. Writing in Frontiers in Nanotechnology, a consortium of ten scientists from institutions spanning Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Greece argues that Safe and Sustainable-by-Design, or SSbD, has outpaced the workforce meant to implement it. The framework, which integrates safety, sustainability and functionality into every stage of a material’s innovation life cycle, has become a cornerstone of European policy. Yet the skills needed to apply it remain scattered across silos of expertise, locked within discipline-specific training pathways, and sustained only by short-lived, project-based initiatives. The authors’ remedy is as bold as the problem is large: a coordinated Pan-European training partnership, built as a living ecosystem that links competency development with system-level enablers and measurable implementation outcomes.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Advanced materials, including nanomaterials, are now recognised as strategic enablers of Europe’s green and digital transitions, underpinning sectors from energy and construction to mobility, electronics and health. Recent policy initiatives, shaped in part by the influential Draghi Report on European competitiveness, have elevated advanced materials to a question of technological sovereignty and sustainable innovation. The European Commission’s Strategy on Advanced Materials for Leadership lays out fourteen actions, ranging from boosting research and innovation to accelerating the leap from laboratory to industrial scale, increasing investment, and establishing new governance structures such as the Technology Council for Advanced Materials. That council’s subgroup on uptake and deployment has explicitly called for supporting education and skills for advanced materials and for ensuring that standards and regulations allow new materials to enter the marketplace efficiently. In other words, the political machinery is turning; what is missing, the researchers contend, is the human infrastructure to make SSbD real.

SSbD itself is technically demanding in ways that traditional training rarely accommodates. The framework’s guidelines, prepared by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, make clear that implementation requires integrating knowledge from scientific, technical, social and policy domains simultaneously. A competent practitioner must span material design, risk assessment, life-cycle thinking, sustainability assessment, ethics, governance and stakeholder engagement. Assessing human health impacts alone demands familiarity with the prioritised map of OECD Test Guidelines developed under the Malta Initiative. And despite the European Union’s long-standing commitment to responsible innovation, the current SSbD community remains dominated by nanosafety and sustainability experts, with ethicists and social scientists playing a markedly smaller role. Recent work has begun to expand social and economic sustainability assessments within the framework, but the authors stress that Social Science and Humanities theories and case studies must move from the margins of SSbD training to its core if the framework is to be applied credibly across its full breadth.

The evidence for a skills gap is not merely anecdotal. A survey of 172 members of the international nanotechnology community found that future training programmes should move beyond technical risk and sustainability assessment to cover socio-economic evaluation, implementation challenges, stakeholder engagement and decision-making under uncertainty. Emerging studies on SSbD capacity-building echo this, calling for a common educational foundation that pairs technical competencies with social, ethical and communication skills. Some initiatives have already begun responding: the Network for Safety and Sustainability of Chemicals and Materials has led competence mapping efforts; the Joint Research Centre and the Horizon Europe Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals run annual SSbD Boot Camps; and newer ventures such as the European Advanced Materials Academy and Sweden’s Mistra SafeChem research programme are promoting modular training, lifelong learning and interdisciplinary collaboration. But the authors find that these efforts remain fragmented, often limited in duration, geographic reach and disciplinary scope, with little attention paid to governance structures or mechanisms that could sustain capacity-building beyond the lifespan of individual projects.

To ground their argument in practical reality, the researchers went beyond the literature and gathered perspectives directly from the community. At the SSbD2024 conference, the EthicsbyDesign2024 online conference and the STS Conference Graz 2025, they ran an interactive poster session, a moderated online question-and-answer session and World Café discussions involving participants from academia, industry, consulting and policy. Participation was voluntary and contributions were collected anonymously, with no personal or identifiable information recorded, and the authors are careful to note that these were exploratory activities, illustrative rather than statistically representative of the wider SSbD community. Still, the thematic patterns that emerged were strikingly consistent with the published evidence. Stakeholders repeatedly emphasised interdisciplinary competencies combining risk assessment, sustainability assessment, systems thinking, communication and stakeholder engagement.

Ethics and the social sciences surfaced again and again in these discussions. Participants highlighted Responsible Research and Innovation, science communication, international collaboration and societal impact considerations as essential components of any serious training programme. One particularly forward-looking element of the researchers’ competency synthesis draws on the Inner Development Goals framework, a set of skills and qualities intended to underpin a sustainable global society, including critical thinking. The synthesis also flags emerging concerns such as the ethics of artificial intelligence and data in materials innovation, and the ethics of international collaboration, where openness, security and equity must be balanced. On the technical side, the required toolkit includes risk assessment with uncertainty handling and probabilistic approaches, life-cycle assessment integration, data management skills for coping with data gaps and quality issues across life-cycle stages, multi-criteria decision analysis, and material design for sustainability that accounts for recyclability, reduced complexity and reduced hazardous substances.

Perhaps the most persistent refrain from stakeholders was the need for deeper industry engagement. Participants stressed that SSbD training must reflect sector-specific implementation challenges, aligned with the European Commission’s defined priority areas of energy, construction, mobility and electronics, recently expanded to include health. The authors concede that their own engagement activities suffered from limited industrial participation, which they take as evidence of the problem rather than a dismissal of it: further outreach to industrial associations, small and medium-sized enterprises, start-ups, consultants and sector-specific experts is essential to tailor future training to real-world needs. Without manufacturers and developers at the table, SSbD education risks producing assessments that look rigorous on paper but cannot be translated into innovation and industrial decision-making, a translation barrier that recent literature identifies as a persistent obstacle alongside data availability, interdisciplinary integration and the lack of harmonised terminology.

The researchers’ answer is a conceptual training ecosystem, deliberately framed as a discussion structure rather than a prescriptive model, that connects competency development with system enablers and implementation outcomes. Priority actions include strengthening collaboration among existing European initiatives, developing modular and multilingual curricula, expanding lifelong learning opportunities and broadening participation from industrial and societal stakeholders. Crucially, the proposed partnership would build on what already exists rather than duplicating it. The PLANETS project’s SSbD Workbook and the PARC SSbD Toolbox are cited as valuable foundations that could be woven into future curricula, accelerating programme development by leveraging community-driven tools and shared vocabulary. Harmonised terminology is identified as a prerequisite for effective communication, training and implementation across disciplines and sectors, addressing one of the most stubborn friction points in a field where chemists, toxicologists, engineers, ethicists and regulators must all speak the same language about the same material.

The ultimate ambition extends beyond Europe’s borders. The authors argue that capacity-building should be treated as a strategic enabling condition for the long-term operationalisation of SSbD, and they suggest the Pan-European partnership could evolve into a broader international network, potentially building on the International Network Initiative on Safe and Sustainable Nanotechnologies, which already promotes collaboration and knowledge exchange within the SSbD community. By connecting education, training, reskilling and upskilling with wider European objectives on sustainability, industrial competitiveness and innovation, such a partnership would reduce fragmentation and accelerate the growth of a skilled workforce capable of implementing SSbD principles across sectors and value chains. The vision, funded in part by a long list of EU Horizon projects including Nano-Commons, Risk-Gone, MACRAMÉ, PLANETS and IRISS, is of a self-sustaining training infrastructure that outlives any single grant.

What makes this Perspective compelling is its candour about the limits of goodwill. Europe has the policy frameworks, the assessment tools and increasingly the methodology to make materials safe and sustainable by design, but good intentions collapse without people equipped to execute them. The paper’s authors, drawn from institutions including Empa, RIVM, the University of Nottingham, the Nanotechnology Industries Association and Paris Lodron University Salzburg, represent precisely the cross-sector mix they advocate. Their message to policymakers, universities and industry alike is that training the SSbD workforce is not an accessory to the advanced materials agenda but its foundation, and that the window to build a coordinated, modular, multilingual and sector-sensitive training ecosystem is open now, before fragmented efforts harden into permanent gaps between what Europe promises and what its materials innovators can deliver.

Subject of Research: Capacity-building and training needs for Safe and Sustainable-by-Design nano- and advanced materials in Europe

Article Title: Capacity-building for a Pan-European training partnership for safe and sustainable-by-design nano- and advanced materials: stakeholder-informed perspectives and future directions

Article References: Ortiz-Galvez, L. M., Malsch, I., Resch, S., Falk, A., Briffa, S. M., Salcines, C., Exner, T., Kelly, S., Marcoulaki, E., Soeteman-Hernandez, L. G., & Himly, M. (2026). Capacity-building for a Pan-European training partnership for safe and sustainable-by-design nano- and advanced materials: stakeholder-informed perspectives and future directions. Frontiers in Nanotechnology, 8, Article 1913843. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnano.2026.1913843

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnano.2026.1913843

Keywords: advanced materials, nanomaterials, Safe and Sustainable-by-Design, SSbD, workforce training, capacity-building, sustainability, risk assessment, European Union policy, responsible innovation, life-cycle assessment, interdisciplinary education