This grant funds a workshop to bring together researchers supported by the Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) activity. As NSF's response to the President's Materials Genome Initiative, DMREF seeks to foster tight collaborations between materials researchers in experiment, theory, and computation. These collaborations are founded on highly iterative feedback loops in which experimental results directly inform theory and computation, and vice versa, with the goal of accelerating the discovery and development of new materials. The workshop will provide researchers a forum to share their research results and discuss cross-cutting topics related to establishing and sustaining research collaborations, managing digital data, and supporting long-term simulation software development.
This nascent community can provide leadership to the broader materials research community in implementing strategies to achieve the goals set out by the Materials Genome Initiative, including reducing both the cost and time it takes to bring a new material to market. The workshop will address both successes and challenges faced at the early stages of research, particularly for highly collaborative projects, and will help solidify newly-formed collaborations. Overarching themes identified through presentations and discussions will be presented in a report for dissemination to the broader materials research community and will help inform future research programs. The workshop will be held in Arlington, Virginia, on September 8-10, 2013.
In 2011, President Obama announced the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a national effort intended to shorten the time to bring a new material from discovery to deployment. NSF is supporting MGI in the divisions of Materials Research (DMR); Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI); and Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems (CBET) through the Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) Dear Colleague Letter. The intent of the DMREF activity is to "enable control of material properties through design via the establishment of the interrelationships between constitution, processing, structure, properties, performance and process control." A workshop was held on September 8-10, 2013 at NSF headquarters with the goal of bringing together the first class of DMREF awardees (Fall 2012) to discuss their successes and challenges and to begin building a unique research community skilled in the types of collaboration necessary to further the goals set out in the DMREF Dear Colleague letter. At least 47 DMREF project investigators, federal agency program managers, graduate student and postdoctoral fellows attended this community-building workshop co-organized by DMREF grantees, including principal investigator (PI) Sean Agnew (University of Virginia), Anton Van der Ven (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Yihui Yang (University of Washington). Because DMREF serves the broader interagency MGI, program managers of multiple NSF directorates and programs, Department of Energy, Army, Navy, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) also attended. The workshop opened with a dinner and visionary speech about MGI by Cyrus Wadia, Assistant Director of Clean Energy and Materials R&D, within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He fielded questions from the DMREF researchers about the MGI program in general and the role of the NSF DMREF within it. The body of the workshop served as a platform for the researchers to report on their technical research results to date with the program managers and with each other. A short opening speech was delivered by Mary Galvin (DMR Director) and Steven McKnight (CMMI Director). Invited lectures were presented by Thomas Russell (Division of Mathematical Sciences) and Ralph Watcher (Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE)), to inform the grantees of other, related NSF programs in the areas of Data and Cyberinfrastructure. Two plenary speakers (Profs. Anthony Rollett, Carnegie Mellon University and Surya Kalidindi, Georgia Institute of Technology) emphasized interactions between experimentation and modeling and application of data mining techniques to problems relevant to materials development. Most of the workshop was comprised of technical presentations by the DMREF teams and break-out sessions designed to elicit input from the DMREF team members about non-technical aspects of the program. Specific outcomes of the workshop include: 1) dissemination of current technical research results to the program managers and other DMREF grantees at the workshop; and 2) a published paper (K. Feldman and S.R. Agnew, JOM, Vol. 66, No. 3, 2014, DOI: 10.1007/s11837-014-0888-0), which summarizes the technical program content and reports on the results of the discussion sessions. Key quotes from the article follow. "14 [DMREF] projects were funded [in 2012], representing a total investment of approximately $13 million. Nearly all of the projects are collaborative, involving at least three co-principle investigators. Several include industrial collaborators and are co-funded through the NSF GOALI (Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry) solicitation, which promotes university-industry partnerships… Despite the modest size of the program,…DMREF projects represent a broad range of material classes, from designed peptides and proteins, to functional/electronic/spintronic crystals and films, to structural metals and ceramics." Later, "[T]he burden—and opportunity—of training the next generation of materials researchers falls disproportionately on the shoulders of individuals like them. In the eyes of many of the grantees, the factor that is presently slowing the MGI approach is not technical. Rather, it is identifying, recruiting, and training the next cohort of researchers." Finally, the JOM article also serves the broader goal of publicizing the contribution of NSF to the MGI through the DMREF program and helped to make future DMREF researchers aware of the current DMREF dear colleague letter opportunity. In addition to these tangible outcomes, two graduate students and one postdoctoral travel fellowship were issued to permit a unique opportunity for future researchers, faculty, or program managers to receive a "behind the scenes" look at federal research program management and development. In addition, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science and Policy Fellow, Kathleen Feldman, who was on assignment at NSF, served as a virtual co-organizer of the workshop and co-author of the aforementioned JOM article. Her involvement in the project was invaluable help to the PI and hopefully provided her with career-building experience.
