This award provides partial support for a workshop to bring together a diverse group of community experts from academia, government, and industry to explore the integration of major Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) activities in various universities across the nation and to learn about important ongoing MGI research through plenary speakers and posters on major MGI-related themes. The Materials Genome Initiative is a multi-agency initiative designed to create a new era of policy, resources, and infrastructure that support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost. Ideas developed during the workshop will provide the foundation to develop a roadmap for integrating MGI activities. This will advance the science and engineering of materials. Since advanced materials are essential to economic security and human well-being, this workshop contributes more broadly to the needs of society.
This workshop contributes to building a network to integrate ongoing and future activities associated with the MGI. The workshop will be held June 5-6, 2014 at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia. The MGI has launched a broad discussion among industry, government and university stakeholders on digital data, computation, and experiments necessary to accelerate the discovery and development of materials and their incorporation into products. The stated MGI goal is to speed up the process from discovery to deployment, in "half the time at half the cost." However, efforts to achieve this goal are often localized in specific institutions leading to major challenges in integrating efforts to achieve synergies, employ best practices, and avoid duplication. Related to these challenges, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in conjunction with the 2nd anniversary of the MGI, announced in June 2013 an initiative organized jointly by Georgia Tech, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan to begin a national dialogue regarding prospects for establishing a national scale "Accelerator Network" for materials discovery, development, and deployment. Such an Accelerator Network would support MGI goals of significantly reducing the timeframe required to discover, develop, and deploy materials through collaborative efforts among industry, government, and university stakeholders. The merit of this activity lies in its potential to lead to more efficient and effective incorporation of scientific and engineering advances from institutions across the nation leading into the community leading to more rapid progress on the effort to decrease the time from the discovery of a material to its deployment in products.
