NSF to fund $12M for first ‘designing materials’ DMREF awards in support of MGI

In support of the federal Materials Genome Initiative, the NSF has just announced the first projects to receive funding awards under a new “materials by design” initiative, which goes by the formal name of Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future. The agency says these initial DMREF awards total $12 million and are earmarked for 22 grants in support of 14 DMREF efforts. Funding for the awards mainly comes from the NSF’s Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Engineering Directorates.

NSF emphasizes that these projects are also intended to open opportunities for university–industry collaborations. Indeed, partial funding for several of the projects comes from the agency’s Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry program.

In a NSF news release, Ian Robertson, director of NSF’s Division of Materials Research, says, “Experimental and computational approaches are key to DMREF, which along with the emerging field of materials informatics, work in a synergistic partnership, each challenging and pushing the other in new directions. Success for DMREF and MGI hinges on the success of that partnership.”

NSF officials say the funded projects combine both new science discoveries and the development of new algorithms and software to speed materials and applications development. Steven McKnight, director of the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, predicts in the same NSF release that the DMREF effort will “foster discoveries that lead to effective tools and methods for materials scientists and engineers to utilize in design and practice—as well as for further research endeavors. To do this effectively and rapidly, partnerships between NSF-sponsored investigators and students and their industry partners are essential to communicate both critical needs and emerging opportunities from DMREF research discoveries. The use of the GOALI program provides those opportunities for DMREF grantees.”

In particular, the NSF frames the DMREF work as directly addressing the Materials Genome Initiative goal of halving the current cost and time required to develop a new material and successfully move it into the marketplace.

Below are 14 projects and the principal investigators involved (several of which will be familiar to readers of this blog).