The Materials Genome Initiative: One year on
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Genome Initiative: One year on
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little over a year has passed since US President Barack Obama launched the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) to enhance the United States’ global competitiveness by cutting in half the current time and cost of bringing new materials from the laboratory to the marketplace. MGI is part of the president’s larger innovation and competitiveness agenda addressing advanced domestic manufacturing. Traditional materials development can be described as a continuum that spans discovery to deployment and commonly takes 10 to 20 years to traverse. Thus, materials crucial to solving some of society’s most pressing problems may have already been invented and are awaiting implementation in a manufactured product. MGI aims to accelerate this timeline by creating a materials innovation infrastructure (MII) that will more closely integrate experimental tools, computational tools, and digital data. Through the MII, the discovery-todevelopment continuum would become more iterative and collaborative, which the administration hopes will result in more new materials brought to market in a shorter amount of time. In many ways, MGI is the next step in the natural evolution of a movement that began in the 1980s with accelerated advances in computation and the concept of “materials by design,” and has continued through more recent activities in integrated computational materials engineering. According to Linda Horton, director of the Materials Sciences and Engineering Division at the Department
of Energy (DOE), “The community is ready for this initiative. The confluence of computational and experimental advances has made the research community very well prepared for launching this activity.” Although the community may have the technological preparation to take on the challenges of MGI, fully embracing the initiative requires a cultural shift. “We’re asking people to change the way they think about their work,” said Jim Warren, special advisor to the director on MGI at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “Make it, test it, make it, test it’ is not an MGI approach. Experiments need to be carefully selected against models so one can enhance the value of the experiment and the model.” This means bringing together the separate and often disparate communities of materials experimentation, simulation, modeling, and theory to form collaborative research networks. As MGI develops, additional issues will have to be addressed, such as how to recognize and assign value to contributed data sets, and how to navigate and police the emerging world of open access. Several government agencies are working to advance the initiative, coordinated by an interagency subcommittee chaired by Cyrus Wadia, assistant director for Clean Energy and Materials Research and Development at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In FY 2012, DOE, NIST, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Defense (DoD) have together invested over $60 million in
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