Conference: Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) Biennial Principal Investigator Workshop; Washington, DC; July 30-31, 2024

This award funds a workshop to bring together Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) grantees and program managers from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DoE), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and various other federal agencies with a stake in the MGI. The MGI was launched in 2011 to accelerate the discovery, design, development, and deployment of new materials, at a fraction of the cost, by harnessing the power of data and computational tools in concert with experiment. As NSF's response to the MGI, the Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program seeks to foster collaborations between materials researchers with expertise in synthesis, experiment, theory, computation, and data science on highly iterative feedback loops in which experimental results directly inform theory and computation, and vice versa. This workshop brings together DMREF awardees with those supported by other federal agencies in order to discuss their challenges and successes; provide an assessment of the current status of the Initiative; and be a springboard to collaborative work leveraging rapid growth in data, data-driven AI/ML, and community-wide infrastructure development. A primary goal of this workshop is to assess the current status and opportunities for MGI across participating agencies. The following aims are pursued: 1) Accelerate materials research through data-driven approaches including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, 2) Transition fundamental research along the Materials Development Continuum, 3) Address educational and diversity issues, and 4) Promote collaboration among MGI PIs. The workshop will consist of overview talks of MGI-related activities at various federal agencies, technical presentations by the attendees, poster sessions, and breakout sessions on overarching topics. The overarching themes will be presented in a report for dissemination to the broader materials research community and the public. The program includes workgroups focused on workforce development where students and postdoctoral scholars are encouraged to attend and participate. Results from the workshop will be made available to the broader materials community and the public in the form of an electronic (PDF) Conference Proceeding booklet that will include abstracts from the posters and presentations. The workshop, which will be held in downtown Washington DC on July 30-31, 2024, follows a series of successful workshops, the latest being held in June 2022. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.