NSF Efforts to Achieve the Nation's Vision for the Materials Genome Initiative

The Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) was launched in 2011 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to help accelerate the design, discovery, development and deployment of advanced materials and to reduce costs through the integration of advanced computation and data management with experimental synthesis and characterization. A broad range of federal agencies - including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense - are part of the MGI effort and have invested more than $1 billion in resources and infrastructure accumulative since the start.

The efforts of NSF have been focused largely within the Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer Our Future (DMREF) program, which supports the development of fundamental science, computational and experimental tools for generating and managing data, and workforce that enable industry and other government agencies to develop and deploy materials that meet societal needs and national priorities. At the request of NSF, this report evaluates the goals, progress, and scientific accomplishments of the DMREF program within the context of similar efforts both within the United States and abroad. The recommendations of this report will assist NSF as it continues to increase its engagement with industry and federal agencies to transition the results from fundamental science efforts to reach the MGI goal of deploying advanced materials at least twice as fast as possible today, at a fraction of the cost that meet national priorities.