Interdisciplinary collaboration, robust funding cited as key to success of Materials Genome Initiative program
- PDF / 1,118,472 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 60 Downloads / 210 Views
Interdisciplinary collaboration, robust funding cited as key to success of Materials Genome Initiative program www.whitehouse.gov/mgi
T
he US government’s Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), now in its third year, seeks to significantly reduce the time and cost of bringing new materials from the laboratory to the marketplace through enhanced integration of computation, experiment, and digital data. The National Science Foundation (NSF), one of the main agencies participating in MGI, supports the initiative through its Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) activity. The program funds collaborative and iterative approaches to materials design in which computation guides experiment and theory, which in turn further advance computation. NSF invested over USD$12 million in the program’s first round of awards to support 14 projects in Fiscal Year (FY) 2012, and recently announced over USD$22 million in awards for FY 2013 to support 19 projects. The DMREF awards made thus far cover a wide range of basic materials science and engineering topics, from fracture behavior in metallic alloys and functional materials for spintronics, to anisotropy in organic glasses and self-assembling peptide nanotubes. The projects are typically collaborations between several principal investigators (PIs) that are three to four years in duration. For most researchers who received a first-round award, the intimate, interdisciplinary, and often large collaborations DMREF engenders have been the keys to scientific success. Haitham El Kadiri, a professor at Mississippi State University, is part of a four-PI team working to develop and verify models capable of predicting failure in Mg alloys. “The problem we’re addressing is so complex you need a large group with a range of expertise,” said
894
MRS BULLETIN
•
VOLUME 38 • NOVEMBER 2013
•
El Kadiri. “It would be almost impossible for a single research group to tackle this.” For Ting Xu of the University of California–Berkeley, and Sinan Keten of Northwestern University, the combination of experiment and theory has enabled them to be successful and efficient in understanding the way different conformations of peptides stack to form nanotubes for use in selective membranes. “Seeing Sinan’s visualization of how our systems are working provides more certainty about which direction to take my experiments,” said Xu. Keten then uses Xu’s experimental work to verify each new round of models. “Seeing the benefits of this approach, I’ve changed the way I’m carrying out my research,” Keten said. “I now want to incorporate experimental aspects into each of my projects.” While the projects have made progress integrating theory and experiment, for most the iterative component will have to come later. “Large collaborations like this have a bit of a start-up time,” said Darrin Pochan of the University of Delaware. “You have to hire all the necessary personnel and buy equipment, and you
have to spend time talking about your individual capabilities and your joint goals for the pr
Data Loading...
