Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future
DMREF is the primary program by which NSF participates in the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) for Global Competitiveness. MGI recognizes the importance of materials science to the well-being and advancement of society and aims to "deploy advanced materials at least twice as fast as possible today, at a fraction of the cost." DMREF integrates materials discovery, development, property optimization, and systems design and optimization, with each employing a toolset to be developed within a materials innovation infrastructure. The toolset will synergistically integrate advanced computational methods and visual analytics with data-enabled scientific discovery and innovative experimental techniques to revolutionize our approach to materials science and engineering. Accordingly, DMREF will support activities that accelerate materials discovery and development by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to design and make materials with specific and desired functions or properties from first principles. This will be accomplished by understanding the interrelationships of composition, structure, properties, processing, and performance. Achieving this goal will involve modeling, analysis, and computational simulations, validated and verified through sample preparation, characterization, and device demonstration. It will require new data analytic tools and statistical algorithms; advanced simulations of material properties in conjunction with new device functionality; advances in predictive modeling that leverage machine learning, data mining, and sparse approximation; data infrastructure that is accessible, extensible, scalable, and sustainable; the development, maintenance, and deployment of reliable, interoperable, and reusable software for the next-generation design of materials; and new collaborative capabilities for managing large, complex, heterogeneous, distributed data supporting materials design, synthesis, and longitudinal study. The multidisciplinary character of this effort dictates the involvement of programs in the NSF Directorates of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Three or four year awards totaling $750,000 – $1,600,000 for the award period are anticipated. To cover the breadth of this endeavor, it is expected that proposed projects will be directed by a team of at least two Senior Personnel with complementary expertise.
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