President Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget includes $100 million for programs to catalyze new activity in computing, software, and data management, and that incorporate new materials into the manufacturing process. This reflects a vision for a new era of materials innovation where advanced materials can be developed, manufactured, and commercialized at significantly less expense and at least twice as fast as is possible today.

This vision was laid out in a white paper released in June by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that highlights the need for a new materials innovation infrastructure. The United States would be better equipped to meet its energy, national security, and human welfare goals if new materials could be more rapidly developed and commercialized, according to OSTP. In addition, the country would be more globally competitive in the advanced materials market.

“For the last several decades, technological advancement and economic progress have grown more dependent on advanced materials,” said Cyrus Wadia, Assistant Director for Clean Energy and Materials Research and Development at OSTP. “The need and opportunity have aligned in a way that is making possible a new industrial movement where multi-billion dollar industries can be created—industries fueled by advanced materials.”

Developing a new materials innovation infrastructure will be a multiagency initiative, involving programs in the Department of Energy (DOE), National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Defense (DoD). Key elements include an open platform where researchers can share predictive algorithms and computational methods, user-friendly and robust software for modeling materials behavior, and a data management system that facilitates data sharing and searching. These capabilities would augment the experimental tools and techniques related to materials design that have been developed over the last several decades.

In the United States, materials simulation codes are often developed independently, with little collaboration or consistency between laboratories. However, evidence suggests that a more systematic approach could reduce the time and cost of developing new materials. For example, Japan and Europe have a history of funding collaborative, large-scale simulation and coding projects. This has led to open-source tools that enable more efficient data sharing and modeling. Experimental techniques and procedures are often expensive and time-consuming, and replacing them with accurate simulation tools where possible could dramatically accelerate materials development.

The white paper does not lay out a specific implementation plan for the initiative, but it highlights a number of next steps that would be covered by the $100 million funding request:

• ▪ The Administration will hold workshops with representatives from government agencies, industries, national laboratories, and universities to discuss infrastructure design, science and engineering challenges, and policy suggestions.

• ▪ The DOE’s Computational Materials and Chemistry by Design program and NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering program will oversee the development of high-quality software toolkits.

• ▪ DOE and NSF will coordinate the development of next-generation characterization tools that will be used to develop and validate algorithms and software tools.

• ▪ NIST will lead an Advanced Materials by Design program to develop infrastructure standards, reference databases, and other ways to ensure reliable modeling and simulation.

• ▪NSF and DoD will encourage partnerships among stakeholders to foster collaboration within the community and the large-scale adoption of this new infrastructure, as well as to engage and train a next-generation workforce.

Other efforts within DoD and DOE will focus on accelerating the development and adoption of new materials that could help the United States meet national goals, such as increasing energy efficiency and reducing dependence on critical materials with uncertain supply chains.

“We will coordinate activities in various agencies so there is a consistent set of goals and well-defined milestones across the agencies,” said Wadia. In addition, he said that a major goal over the next year is to seed a broad set of related activities outside of the federal government, such as industry fellowship programs. Making the vision a reality will require investments from the private sector, academia, professional societies, and the federal government.

“This initiative is an ‘all-hands on deck’ effort. For this to be successful it will require proactive leadership and creative thinking from the entire materials science community. Our goal is to champion the best ideas while continuing to catalyze and seed new efforts in support of this vision,” he said.

The white paper, Materials Genome Initiative for Global Competitiveness, was prepared by an ad hoc group of the Office of Science and Technology Policy‘s National Science and Technology Council. For more information and to download the paper, visit the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s website, www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp.