This first CMSN project has been operating since the summer of 1999. The main achievement of the project was to bring together a community of materials scientists, physicists and mathematicians who share a common interest in the properties of interfaces and the impact of those properties on microstructural evolution. Six full workshops were held at Carnegie Mellon (CMU), Northwestern (NWU), Santa Fe, Northeastern University (NEU), National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), Ames Laboratory, and at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) respectively. Substantial scientific results were obtained through the sustained contact between the members of the project. A recent issue of Interface Science (volume 10, issue 2/3, July 2002) was dedicated to the output of the project. The results include: the development of methods for extracting anisotropic boundary energy and mobility from molecular dynamics simulations of solid/liquid interfaces in nickel; the extraction of anisotropic energies and mobilities in aluminum from similar MD simulations; the application of parallel computation to the calculation of interfacial properties; the development of a method to extract interfacial properties from the fluctuations in interface position through consideration of interfacial stiffness; the use of anisotropic interface properties in studies of abnormal grain growth; themore » discovery of abnormal grain growth from random distributions of orientation in subgrain networks; the direct comparison at the scale of individual grains between experimentally observed grain growth and simulations, which confirmed the importance of including anisotropic interfacial properties in the simulations; the classification of a rich variety of dendritic morphologies based on slight variations in the anisotropy of the solid-liquid interface; development of phase field methods that permit both solidification and grain growth to be simulated within the same framework.« less