In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), the White House brought together about 70 leaders from academia, industry and federal agencies to discuss progress and accomplishments of the MGI, and featured a federal perspective on the initiative delivered by a panel of federal agency administrators.

The White House blog post summarizes the event and the accomplishments of the MGI at https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/01/materials-genome-initiative-first-five-years.

Underlying the various goals of the MGI is the need to make cross-disciplinary connections to facilitate acceleration of processes underlying all phases from materials discovery to deployment involving stakeholder communities ranging from academia, to government to industry. David McDowell, Executive Director of the Institute for Materials (IMat), was invited to speak as part of the closing panel addressing progress in meeting the MGI strategic goals and defining key gaps in the path forward in future years.  IMat’s MGI strategist in data science and informatics, Surya Kalidindi, was also invited to attend.

Dr. McDowell, Carter N. Paden Jr. Distinguished Chair in Metals Processing and Regents’ Professor, has been involved in the MGI process since its inception in 2011.  Georgia Tech, along with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan, has coordinated both regional and national workshops through a joint networking partnership – the Materials Accelerator Network – to explore how distributed experimental, computational and materials information infrastructure might be networked most efficiently to realize the MGI vision. (Read more about the 2014 workshop.)

MGI was announced by President Barack Obama in June 2011 to accelerate the development and deployment of new materials with the rallying phrase “half the time at half the cost.” MGI has launched a broad discussion among industry, government and university stakeholders regarding the fusion of digital data and data science, computation and experiments necessary to accelerate the discovery, development and insertion of materials.

McDowell’s panel considered such issues as the shift of culture in academic, industry and government that is necessary to address MGI goals, future workforce development, managing and sharing data generated by researchers, and broadening the materials innovation ecosystem to include systems engineering, manufacturing scale-up, and various other disciplines. Other participants in the panel were Greg Olson of QuesTek Innovations LLC, Darrell Schlom of Cornell University and Katherine Stevens of GE Aviation. Linda Sapochak, Director of the Division of Materials Research at the National Science Foundation, served as moderator.