"To help businesses discover, develop, and deploy new materials twice as fast, we're launching what we call the Materials Genome Initiative. The invention of silicon circuits and lithium-ion batteries made computers and iPods and iPads possible -- but it took years to get those technologies from the drawing board to the marketplace. We can do it faster." -President Barack Obama, June 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University
External Stakeholder Activities
The White House has announced several commitments by universities and businesses to further the goals of the Materials Genome Initiative. Learn more about these commitments below:
- University of Wisconsin-Madison is investing $5 million to create the Wisconsin Materials Innovation Institute, a cross-disciplinary technological hub to provide infrastructure for the materials community.
- Georgia Institute of Technology is launching a new Institute for Materials, an interdisciplinary research institute to foster a materials ecosystem for research and education, as part of a $10 million commitment over the next 5 years.
- Led by a team from Harvard University and IBM the Harvard Clean Energy Project has publicly released a searchable database of 2.3 million molecules and associated data.
- In a new public-private partnership the Materials Project, a collaboration between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Intermolecular, Inc. are joining forces to provide enhanced simulation tools to the scientific community through the open-source Materials Project.
- The Autodesk Simulation Workshop and Autodesk Sim 360 are free online sources of education modules that can be used to train the next generation of engineers in advanced materials use.
- The Orlando Materials Innovation Principles is an effort by 31 organizations to collaborate on utilizing and developing new IT tools and driving open models for data and knowledge sharing.
- The new UConn Technology Park is a planned $170 Million facility designed to foster public-private collaboration on advanced materials research.
- The Materials Project is a collaboration between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to accelerate innovation in materials research by providing materials researchers with the information they need.
- The University Materials Council (UMC) is a group of 33 universities who have pledged to pursue innovative new methods to train future materials scientists and engineers.
- The Center for Computational Materials Science and Engineering Data is an effort by ASM International to define protocols collecting, disseminating, and managing materials data.
- In support of the MGI, the University of Michigan is committing to invest $30 million over the next five years in activity that includes: the establishment of an Institute of Computation in Science and Engineering, new high performance computing resources, a center for industry, government, and academia to jointly develop and optimize manufacturing processing and a new summer materials education school.
- Iowa State University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Ames Laboratory, in partnership with a network of universities and industrial partners, will be initiating a series of workshops called "Mapping the Materials Genome" focused on identifying the critical research challenges and establishing the experimental and computational techniques by which the "Materials Genome" can in fact be realized.
- The Carbon Nanostructures Consortium is an industry-led, multi-sector effort established by Lockheed Martin to accelerate the development and transition of affordable, high-performance carbon nanostructure-enhanced materials.
- GE Global Research will convene a Summit on Additive Manufacturing, bringing together design, material and process modeling technologies with manufacturing process development to drive faster adoption of critical technology.