New commitments to MGI
More than 60 universities and companies committed to advance the MGI through education and research, including the release of material properties databases and partnerships among universities, industry and national labs. And there's more.
Commitments to the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) announced this year build on support from five participating MGI agencies — the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Aeronautics and Space Admin. (NASA) — which, in 2012, made more than 70 awards to support MGI-related research, totaling nearly $63 million. The academic and private sectors have responded in kind. More than 60 universities and companies committed to advance the MGI through education and research, including the release of material properties databases and partnerships among universities, industry and national labs. Other news:
- NIST is committing $25 million over five years to form a second center of excellence that will create a collaborative environment and concentration of technical capability to accelerate materials discovery and development. NIST also will collaborate with ASM International (Materials Park, Ohio) and its Computational Materials Data Network to establish an open, digital repository of materials data.
- In support of MGI, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Georgia Institute of Technology are creating new “institutes in materials innovation” with collective investments totaling about $15 million, and the University of Michigan has committed to invest an additional $20 million to MGI programs that are already underway. Moreover, all three universities will partner to launch a nationwide dialogue and build a nationwide “materials innovation accelerator network.”Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Intermolecular Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) are working together to more accurately predict material behavior with software tools made openly available by LBNL. Building on data from existing high-throughput combinatorial experimentation and simulation, researchers anticipate a set of tools that could increase the speed of new materials development tenfold or more over conventional approaches.
- Harvard University and IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) are releasing a free, open database describing 2.3 million new materials for potential use in solar cells — the largest of its kind.
