American NSF invests in designing materials for the future

The Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) program is the primary means by which NSF actively contributes to the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) for Global Competitiveness. Since MGI’s inception in 2011, NSF and numerous other federal agencies have worked together through the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee for MGI to galvanize and support the diverse relevant research communities towards the goal of building a national capability for “deploying advanced materials at least twice as fast as possible today, at a fraction of the cost." Since 2012, the NSF DMREF program has helped the involved research communities nurture and foster the requisite culture shift in materials research, which relies on encouraging and facilitating an integrated team approach that embraces the tools of data science and machine learning.

On this tenth anniversary of MGI, NSF announces a $65.3M investment in 37 new DMREF awards supported by nine Divisions across the Directorates of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). Among this cohort, 13 awards include Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) collaborators through the NSF - Air Force Partnership in Advanced Material Sciences.

“The DMREF program unifies the materials enterprise across NSF and other federal agencies offering a multidisciplinary funding opportunity that enables research teams to harness the power of data and machine learning and train the next generation workforce,” notes Dr. Linda Sapochak, Division Director for the Division of Materials Research, and subcommittee co-chair for MGI. Dr. John Schlueter, DMREF program lead, is “excited by the diversity of this year’s cohort and the wide range of research topics that hold significant potential for societal impact”.  

Original text and list of awards