Materials Genome Initiative
Project Description: The Materials Genome Initiative, announced by President Obama in June 2011, recognizes the importance of materials science to the well-being and advancement of society and seeks to integrate all components in the materials continuum, including materials discovery, development, property optimization, systems design and optimization, certification, manufacturing and deployment, with each employing the toolset developed within the materials innovation infrastructure. The innovation infrastructure recognizes the need to build communities, expertise and infrastructure in three interrelated areas -- computational tools, experimental tools and data. In each area, the vision is on development and application of next generation capabilities in and across all aspects of the materials continuum. The complexity and challenge of activities addressed by this initiative will require a transformative approach to the discovery and development of new materials, optimization and / or prediction of properties of materials, informing the design and manufacturing of material systems, and optimization of use in application. Success, deployment of new materials in applications twice as fast and at half the cost, demands a collaborative, synergistic approach between theory, computation, experiments and informatics. This in turn requires establishing cohesion between what are today disparate research communities. In this presentation, I will outline the challenges and opportunities created by this initiative.
Speaker Bio: Robertson, formerly Donald B. Willett professor of engineering at the University of Illinois and director of the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research, leads a growing college with more than 4,000 undergraduates, 1,500 graduate students, and an annual budget totaling more than $200 million.
Robertson's research focuses on how microstructure evolves in materials exposed to extreme conditions— stress, strain rate, gaseous and chemical environments and radiation—to enhance understanding of macro-scale property changes. He is author of more than 240 research publications on materials science topics and was named fellow of ASM International in 2009.
From 2011-13, Robertson was director of the Division of Materials Research for the National Science Foundation. From 2003-2009, he served as Department Head for the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois. He has been a member of the materials science faculty since 1983.
Robertson has received numerous teaching and research awards, including DOE awards for outstanding scientific accomplishment in metallurgy and ceramics (DOE Basic Energy Sciences, 1982) for contributions to our understanding of mechanisms of hydrogen embrittlement (DOE EE Fuel Cell Program, 2011), and is the 2014 recipient of the ASM Edward DeMille Campbell Memorial Lectureship.
He received his bachelor's in applied physics, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland in 1978; and Doctor of Metallurgy, University of Oxford, Oxford, England, in 1982.