Status of Neutrino Factory R&D within the Muon Collaboration

We describe the current status of the research within the Muon Collaboration towards realizing a Neutrino Factory. We describe briefly the physics motivation behind the neutrino factory approach to studying neutrino oscillations and the longer term goal of building the Muon Collider. The benefits of a step by step staged approach of building a proton driver, collecting and cooling muons followed by the acceleration and storage of cooled muons are emphasized. Several usages of cooled muons open up at each new stage in such an approach and new physics opportunites are realized at the completion of each stage.