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The First Five Years of the Materials Genome Initiative: 

Accomplishments and Technical Highlights

August 2, 2016 

“To help businesses discover, develop, and deploy new materials twice as

fast, we’re launching what we call the Materials Genome Initiative.”

President Obama’s remarks at 

Carnegie Mellon University

June 24, 2011 

On June 24, 2011, President Obama announced the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a 

multi-agency initiative designed to create a new era of policy, resources, and 

infrastructure that support U.S. institutions in the effort to discover, manufacture, and 

deploy advanced materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost than it’s taken in 

the past. Over the past five years, Federal agencies, including the Departments of 

Energy (DOE) and Defense (DoD), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National 

Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration (NASA), have invested more than $500 million in resources and 

infrastructure in support of this initiative.

Federal agencies have been working closely together and with collaborators from the 

public and private sectors to cultivate a cultural paradigm shift and make technical 

progress towards the initiative’s ambitious goals. Agencies have established or 

supplemented an array of research and development programs. An expanding set of 

materials databases are being accessed by thousands of users to mine the properties of 

hundreds of thousands of materials. And, interdisciplinary research centers at 

universities and government laboratories around the country are discovering and 

developing new materials, working with industrial collaborators to deploy those 

materials, and educating the future materials workforce.

This document provides a selection of accomplishments and technical highlights 

illustrating the progress made during the first five years of the initiative. The examples 

are organized under the following four key challenges as set out in the 2014 MGI 

Strategic Plan (note that many examples contribute to more than one challenge):

• Lead a culture shift in materials research to encourage and facilitate an integrated 

team approach;

• Integrate experiment, computation, and theory and equip the materials community 

with advanced tools and techniques;

• Make digital data accessible; and

• Create a world-class materials workforce that is trained for careers in academia or 

industry.
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LEAD A CULTURE SHIFT IN MATERIALS RESEARCH

1. NIST and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are launching a

virtual high-throughput experimentation facility with the goal of accelerating the

generation of the huge volumes of additional data needed to validate existing

materials models and to develop new, more sophisticated models with more

powerful predictive capabilities. The virtual facility will consist of a national

network of high-throughput synthesis and characterization tools integrated into the

MGI materials data infrastructure. The facility will foster coordination and data

integration across high-throughput experimentation programs. The result will be a

widely accessible, growing resource open to all researchers in pursuit of novel

materials. Read more.

2. NIST launched and funds the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design, a collaboration

between NIST, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and Argonne

National Laboratory (ANL) to develop key components of the materials innovation

infrastructure, including databases of materials properties and materials simulation

software, while simultaneously using these tools to design new materials with

targeted applications such as aerospace, electronics, and health care. Read more and

more.

3. A team sponsored by the DoD Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and led by

GE-Aviation and Lockheed Martin demonstrated that by coupling process modeling

with mechanical analysis, engineers can design better, more innovative components

while reducing the time needed and cost for design. Composite materials can

provide tremendous improvements in aircraft fuel efficiency, but are very complex

to make and use in aircraft design. The methods produced by the team are becoming

standard work within both companies and will enable them to design new aircraft

components with higher confidence at less cost. Read more and more.

4. The DoD Army Research Laboratory (ARL) established the Enterprise for Multiscale

Research of Materials to enable the design of materials for future Army Systems. This

enterprise is comprised of ARL researchers and a broad range of academic and

industrial collaborators. Two Collaborative Research Alliances have been

formalized, one for Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environments led by Johns Hopkins

University that focuses on protection materials, and one for Multi-Scale Modeling of

Electronic Materials led by the University of Utah that focuses on battery and

electronic applications. These alliances are focused on developing materials to meet

future Army needs, while also building the future workforce. Read more and more.

5. The DoD’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) established the Lightweight Innovations

for Tomorrow (LIFT) Manufacturing Innovation Institute for metals processing and
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structural design to provide lighter weight products, systems, and vehicles. LIFT is 

providing the facilities and expertise to mitigate risk for businesses of all sizes in

adopting advanced manufacturing technology. The institute is also working to 

strengthen the skills of a diverse workforce through programs targeting returning 

veterans, at risk youth, university students pursuing graduate degrees, and current 

manufacturing workforce. Read more and more. 

6. NASA, in close collaboration with NIST, established the MaterialsLab program on the 

International Space Station. This program is accelerating the development of higherperforming materials and processes for use both in space and on Earth, offering

unique insights into how materials develop and behave in the microgravity

environment. By sharing the results through NASA’s open Physical Sciences 

Informatics data repository, researchers—including students—can easily access data 

from station experiments and build on each other's work. Read more. 

INTEGRATE EXPERIMENT, COMPUTATION, AND THEORY

7. NSF established the interdisciplinary program Designing Materials to Revolutionize 

and Engineer our Future (DMREF), which is funding small academic teams to 

discover, design, and make materials with specific and desired functions or 

properties from first principles. (Also see item 28.) Since its inception in 2012, the 

DMREF program has awarded 258 grants to teams at 80 academic institutions in 30 

states. Read more. 

8. Successful iteration between experiment and computation led a NSF and DOEfunded team from University of Wisconsin-Madison to discover and design the firstof-its-kind, multifunctional material that is both metallic and polar—contradictory 

properties in one material that can be exploited in future devices to perform 

simultaneous electrical, magnetic, and optical functions. Read more and more. 

9. An NSF-funded team from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 

collaboration with General Electric and others, has designed and built a custom 

microscope that combines electron, ion, and laser beams to analyze new materials 

for defects at the nanometer scale in three dimensions. The addition of the laser is 

critical to speeding up the process of gathering the information, so what used to take 

six to nine months now takes only a couple of days. The microscope is key to the 

team’s development of new multilayered materials designed for high performance 

in extreme environments. In addition to developing new measurement methods, the

team is pioneering the use of new modeling tools to speed up the development 

process and using advanced computer algorithms and “big data” analysis to hone 

designs before testing them. Read more and more. 
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10. NSF has launched the Materials Innovation Platforms program that aims to 

significantly accelerate materials research and development. (Also see item 30.) 

Funded institutions are serving as “platforms” to develop new bulk and thin film 

crystalline hard materials through state-of-the-art instrumentation, and fostering an 

environment that combines multidisciplinary expertise with the best tools available, 

providing access to the instrumentation, data, and new materials created. Read 

more. 

11. The DOE Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) Next Generation Materials by 

Design, led by NREL, has used the DOE’s Materials Project database to identify and 

test promising, non-toxic alternatives to perovskite solar materials. (Also see item 

22.) The team had previously identified defect tolerance and long carrier lifetime as 

the key properties of lead-based perovskite solar materials, which have achieved 

efficiencies of more than 20% in only a few years. Applying the newly discovered

criteria and theoretical calculations, the database enabled the team to evaluate 27,000 

compounds and identify nine additional classes of promising non-toxic alternatives. 

In collaboration with the Center for Excitonics EFRC at the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology, six candidate materials were synthesized and characterized, with two 

showing promising properties. Read more and more. 

12. Through a tight integration of predictive theory and modeling with experimental 

synthesis and characterization, the DOE-funded Nanoporous Materials Genome Center

has discovered and explored microporous and mesoporous metal-organic 

frameworks and zeolites for energy-relevant processes. (Also see item 24.) The 

Center is developing and implementing theoretical and computational approaches 

ranging from high-level electronic structure calculations combined with advanced 

molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo sampling approaches to graph theoretical 

analysis of pore structures. These approaches are assembled in a hierarchical 

screening workflow to discover and advance understanding of novel functional 

nanoporous materials for gas storage, carbon capture, gas- and solution-phase 

separation, and catalysis. Read more. 

13. The DOE Critical Materials Institute (CMI) relies on the integrated MGI approach to 

accelerate the discovery and development of rare-earth replacements, such as new 

phosphors for high-efficiency lighting. The CMI, one of DOE’s Energy Innovation 

Hubs, is a collaboration of researchers from universities, four DOE national 

laboratories, and members of industry working together to assure the supply chains 

for materials critical to clean energy technologies. Read more and more. 

14. At the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, a collaborative manufacturing 

community established at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeling and 

simulation are tightly integrated with materials characterization and in-situ process 
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monitoring to help industry adopt new manufacturing technologies. Such 

integration is key to the success of additive manufacturing and to the 

commercialization of low-cost carbon fiber composite materials for energy-efficient 

vehicles. Read more. 

15. Researchers from AFRL, ANL, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), 

Carnegie Mellon University, Petra III (Germany), PulseRay, and Cornell University 

have developed a revolutionary way of using high-intensity x-rays to measure the 

detailed structure of a material while it is being bent, compressed, or stretched. The 

measurement method provides new insights into how materials fail—insights that 

are critical for creating more accurate models needed to rapidly optimize, predict

and improve the performance of light-weight, high-strength materials for aircraft 

and automobiles. Read more and more.

16. Researchers at AFRL have invented an automated system that can create a material 

under controlled conditions, measure the resulting properties, evaluate the results, 

and then determine and perform the best next experiment—all without a scientist 

involved. Materials research is a complex business, unraveling the reasons why 

materials behave like they do is time consuming and expensive, and can also be 

tedious. This automated system is now being used to dramatically speed the pace of 

research in understanding how to make better carbon nanotubes for use in high 

performance materials for aircraft. Read more and more. 

17. A DoD ONR Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative team led by the 

University of Connecticut has combined high-throughput computational screening, 

informatics, and experimental synthesis and testing to develop a set of new organic 

polymer dielectrics with enhanced properties compared to materials now in use. 

Their success is an excellent example of how the MGI is being harnessed to 

collaboratively design new materials—in this case including an entirely new class of 

metal-based polymer—through an informatics-driven approach. Read more. 

18. Researchers AFRL and Blue Quartz Software have developed a new, open-source 

suite of tools for managing the information that links how a material is made to how 

it performs in service. The new tools, the Spatial Informational Management Protocol 

Library and Digital Representation Environment for the Analysis of Microstructure in 3D, 

not only manage complex data in space, time, and material variables, but provide 

software tools to rapidly analyze materials information in new ways. The 

capabilities provided by these tools allow materials scientists and engineers to 

quickly gain new insights into the way in which materials work. Read more and 

more. 
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19. NASA has announced plans to fund a university-led institute to develop ultra-high 

strength, lightweight structural materials needed for the journey to Mars using an 

MGI-inspired approach. Extending human presence to Mars and deeper into the 

solar system requires high performance materials and structures to enable a safe and 

affordable space infrastructure. Although carbon nanotubes offer potentially 

transformative mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties, manufacturing 

products that live up to that potential has been difficult. A computationally guided 

approach that integrates advanced modeling throughout the entire materials 

development lifecycle will be used to overcome this challenge. Read more and more. 

MAKE DIGITAL DATA ACCESSIBLE

20. NIST created the Materials Data Repository (MDR) to answer the question, “Where do 

I put my data, so that others can use it?” The MDR now hosts approximately 50 

gigabytes of highly heterogeneous data (with several terabytes of additional data in 

the pipeline) spanning 80 individual research communities, with participation of 123 

distinct organizations across academia, government, and industry. The MDR hosts 

materials data for public access, but also allows additional metadata describing the 

data to be specified, provides a persistent identifier allowing for long term citation 

and discovery, and assignment of a distribution license, giving data publishers 

control over the rights to the information. Read more. 

21. NIST is developing the Materials Resource Registry as a materials information “yellow 

pages,” enabling world-wide discovery of available resources (modeled after the 

Virtual Astronomical Observatory’s registry). With more than a hundred listings 

today, and an international team working under the framework of the Research 

Data Alliance, searches over thousands of material resources are now within reach. 

Read more. 

22. The DOE established and funds The Materials Project at the University of California, 

Berkeley, where the properties of new and predicted materials determined through 

high performance computing and state-of-the-art theoretical tools are archived in a 

publicly available database that now has more than 20,000 users. (Also see item 11.) 

The database includes more than 66,000 crystalline compounds, 500,000 nanoporous 

materials, 70,000 electrochemical phase diagrams, 43,000 electronic band structures, 

and 2,900 full elastic tensors (important for understanding mechanical behavior). 

This data is being used by hundreds of researchers each day to identify and design 

new materials for clean energy applications. Read more. 
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23. The DOE Battery Hub Joint Center for Energy Storage Research released two major sets 

of battery data to the public through the Materials Project in May 2016. One set 

encompasses data calculated for nearly 1,500 compounds investigated as potential 

electrodes for batteries with the potential of doubling the battery’s power compared 

with current lithium ion batteries. The other set contains data on more than 21,000

organic molecules relevant for liquid electrolytes for grid storage batteries as well as 

a host of other research applications. The release also included two new web apps—

the Molecules Explorer and the Redox Flow Battery Dashboard—plus an add-on to the 

Battery Explorer web app that enables researchers to investigate other ions in 

addition to lithium. The Redox Flow Battery app generates both scientific parameters 

as well as techno-economic ones, so battery designers can quickly rule out a 

molecule that might perform well but be prohibitively expensive to manufacture. 

Read more and more. 

24. The extensive computational and experimental data generated by the DOE-funded

Nanoporous Materials Genome Center can now be easily explored using the Nanoporous 

Materials Explorer web app available through the Materials Project. (Also see items 12 

and 22.) The app provides an interactive platform for the aggregation and 

presentation of data related to nanoporous materials in a way that was not 

previously possible, enabling rapid identification of promising materials based on 

their performance and properties. Read more. 

25. DOE has established and is funding the Center for PRedictive Integrated Structural 

Materials Science, which has created a unique scientific framework for accelerated 

predictive materials science for structural metals that integrates advanced 

experiments, theory, and simulation. The Center has released four high performance 

computational tools for simulating microstructures and mechanical behavior of 

metals and alloys, with the open source codes made available to the public. On 

August 1, 2016, the Center inaugurated the Materials Commons, a unique, 

collaborative approach for storing and disseminating scientific information. This 

data repository is designed to seamlessly capture and store up to 400 TB of 

publically accessible information. Read more and more. 

26. DOE launched the Energy Materials Network, a growing network of consortia 

allowing industry ready access to its national laboratories’ capabilities, tools, and 

expertise in order to accelerate the materials development cycle for U.S. 

manufacturers. The initial consortia include LightMAT, a network of ten national 

laboratories with technical capabilities that are relevant to lightweight materials 

development and use; ElectroCat, dedicated to finding new ways to replace rare and 

costly platinum group metals used in hydrogen fuel cells with more abundant and 

inexpensive substitutes; and CaloriCool, dedicated to the discovery of high-
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performance energy conversion materials that can be economically adopted by 

industry for a new generation of energy efficient solid-state cooling and refrigeration 

devices. Read more and more. 

27. The DOE High Performance Computing for Manufacturing Program is coupling U.S. 

manufacturers with the DOE national laboratories’ world-class computational 

research and development expertise, and advanced computing resources to address 

key challenges in U.S. manufacturing whose solutions will have broad industry and 

national impact. Under this program, LLNL and Lawrence Berkeley National 

Laboratory, in collaboration with Agenda 2020, are developing scalable models for 

the pulp and paper industry to help reduce energy use in paper-making. LLNL is 

also working with collaborators to dramatically cut the lead time and expense of 

producing gallium nitride wafers needed for solid-state lighting and power 

switching devices. Read more, more, and more. 

CREATE A WORLD-CLASS MATERIALS WORKFORCE

28. Workforce development is a major objective of NSF's DMREF program, and it is 

providing graduate students and post-doctoral researchers with a broad education 

through co-advising and student exchange within multi-disciplinary teams. New 

courses have been developed on methods that promote accelerated materials 

development. (Also see item 7.) Symposia have been organized at national 

conferences in order to educate the community on MGI strategies. Ongoing, 

coordinated outreach activities aimed at underrepresented groups, K-12 students, 

and the general public are sharing the excitement of new materials discovery and 

development. Since the inception of the program in 2012, 110 post-doctoral 

researchers, 730 graduate students, and 100 undergraduate students have been 

trained in research applying the MGI-approach. Read more. 

29. The NSF Research Traineeship program, designed to encourage the development of 

bold, new, potentially transformative, and scalable models for graduate training, has 

awarded nearly $6 million to develop training in data-enabled materials science and 

engineering. Programs at Pennsylvania State University and the University of 

Southern Mississippi are developing new ways to train students on how to bridge ab 

initio methods and applications, and on methods to understand complex interfaces, 

respectively. These awards will help ensure that graduate students develop the 

skills, knowledge, and competencies needed to pursue a range of MGI-related 

careers. Read more and more. 

30. A new summer school is one of many educational and outreach activities being 

conducted under NSF’s Materials Innovation Platforms to accelerate materials 

discovery and development. (Also see item 10). At the PARADIM Bulk Crystal 
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Summer School, a week-long workshop held at John Hopkins University in July 2016, 

graduate students, postdocs, and young faculty learned about the synthesis, 

characterization, and theory of crystal growth through a combination of hands-on 

experience and lectures by internationally recognized crystal growth specialists. 

Read more. 

31. To address the need to educate and develop materials scientists capable of applying 

and/or developing computational tools, NSF is funding the Summer School for 

Integrated Computational Materials Education. The summer school, held annually 

starting in 2011, is accelerating the incorporation of computational materials science 

at universities that lack the resources to implement them on their own, training 

instructors to teach computational materials science and engineering (CMSE) to 

undergraduate students. This program also provides a stepping-stone towards more 

intensive CMSE education and its wider adoption by developing the needed human 

resources. Read more. 

32. The Informatics Skunkworks, launched under an NSF grant for “A Computational 

Materials Data and Design Environment” at University of Wisconsin, Madison, is 

helping undergraduates develop informatics for science and engineering 

applications, learn advanced data science and machine learning skills, expand their 

domain-specific knowledge, and grow their experience of working with teams, 

faculty, and industry. The group has developed a scalable approach for exposing 

undergraduates to the potential of informatics for materials science and engineering. 

Read more and more.