Collaborative Research: Conference: SSMC Collaboration Incubator: Integrating Experiment, Theory and Data for Materials Design

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY This award, provides support for two summer-long workshops, entitled the Solid State and Materials Chemistry Collaboration Incubator (SSMC-CI), that merge the advantages of in-person hackathon-style events and longer-term residential programs to more effectively address materials science problems and nucleate new methods and techniques. The on-going and rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and large-scale computations can be witnessed in many areas of everyday life, from the way advertisements are tailored to individual users on the Internet to the generation of images and text from simple prompts. These advances also have the potential to transform the methods by which scientists design and discover new materials to meet the technical and environmental challenges the nation faces today and will meet in the future. The expertise needed to adopt data science and computational techniques, however, is quite distinct from that used by researchers skilled in the synthesis and analysis of new substances, which in turn are different from the skills needed to measure materials performance. SSMC-CI aims to lower the barrier for materials scientists and data scientists to collaborate. It brings together teams of scientists from a range of backgrounds to collaborate on pressing problems in the areas of solid-state compounds and materials. Each workshop begins with an initial 3-day in-person session to jump-start interactions among team members followed by a program structured around online meetings to sustain and nurture these collaborations, with the goal of creating multidisciplinary teams that have a track-record of progress on scientific questions that are challenging to pursue through traditional approaches. The award is supported through the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program and the Condensed Matter and Materials Theory program, both in NSF’s Division of Materials Research. TECHNICAL SUMMARY Many of the most pressing challenges in solid state and materials chemistry call for an integrated, multidisciplinary approach that combines expertise in materials synthesis, properties characterization, theoretical analysis, computational simulation, and data-science methods. The formation of collaborative teams to meet these challenges encounter the difficulty of bringing people with the right combination of skills together and developing sustained interactions among them. This project, which is supported through the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program and the Condensed Matter and Materials Theory program, both in NSF’s Division of Materials Research, establishes two Solid State and Materials Chemistry Collaboration Incubator (SSMC-CI) events as annual summer workshops to support and nurture the nucleation and growth of such teams, in a manner that merges the advantages of in-person hackathon-style events and longer-term residential programs. Each the SSMC-CI workshop follows a program of the form: (1) a call for proposals of research problems and applications to participate, from which teams are formed, (2) an in-person hackathon in which teams begin to work on their respective projects, as well as receive training in data-science methods, (3) a series of online sessions, during which teams report on their progress and plans for next steps, and (4) a virtual symposium for the teams to make final presentations of their results and lessons learned from their projects. 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.