THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of Science and Technology Policy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 19, 2014

FACT SHEET: The Materials Genome Initiative – Three Years of Progress

This week marks the third anniversary of the launch by President Obama of the

Materials Genome Initiative (MGI)—a commitment to work across sectors toward 

the goal of doubling the pace of advanced materials discovery, innovation, 

manufacture, and commercialization. The MGI is part of a broad Administration

commitment—including new steps announced earlier this week—to take concrete 

actions that spur innovation and entrepreneurship to revitalize American 

manufacturing.

Since the MGI’s launch in 2011, the Federal Government has invested over $250 

million in new R&D and innovation infrastructure that will help anchor emerging 

industrial sectors in the United States that depend on advanced materials. This 

infrastructure promises to accelerate the development of new high-tech materials

that can help address a broad range of national goals diverse domains such as 

energy, health, transportation, food and agriculture, and national defense.

Early milestones for the MGI include: 

 A $25 million multi-stakeholder NIST Center of Excellence, focusing on 

the development of industrially ready advanced materials in emerging 

fields such as self-assembled biomaterials, organic photovoltaic materials, 

advanced ceramics, and novel polymer and metal alloys for structural 

applications; 

 Funding from DOD, DOE and NSF to help support more than 500 

research scientists across 200 companies, universities, and national labs 

who are defining the cutting edge in materials innovation, developing 

new tools in computation and instrumentation, and engaging in 

innovative research to compress the time it takes deploy new materials to 

market; and

 The launch of four new public-private partnerships that employ MGI 

activity to accelerate development and adoption of cutting-edge 

technologies including three of the recently launched Institutes for 

Manufacturing Innovation (America Makes, the Lightweight and Modern 
Metals Innovation Institute, and Next Generation Power Electronics) and 

the DOE Critical Materials Institute .

Today, marking three strong years of progress for the MGI, the Administration is 

highlighting a set of new commitments to expand this effort both within the 

Federal Government and with stakeholders in the advanced materials 

community. New steps announced by the Obama Administration today include:

 Expanding investment in the Materials Genome Initiative to ensure U.S. 

leadership in inventing and manufacturing advanced materials. Five 

Federal agencies will invest more than $150 million in ground-breaking 

research to support the Materials Genome Initiative, upping the 

Administration’s investment in the manufacturing of game-changing 

advanced materials. This public-private endeavor aims to cut in half the 

time it takes to develop novel materials that can fuel advanced 

manufacturing and bolster the 21st century American economy.

 Releasing a draft of the Administration’s MGI Strategic Plan for public 

comment. The National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee 

on the Materials Genome Initiative is releasing for public comment a draft 

of its first strategic plan, which will ultimately serve as an agency 

roadmap for executing on the MGI vision going forward. Federal agencies 

participating in MGI collaborated to develop the draft strategy, which also 

includes input from academia and industry. 

 Announcing new NIST investments in high-throughput research. NIST

is investing $1 million per year in high-throughput materials 

development, including by supporting “smart” window coatings to 

increase energy efficiency in buildings. This work will complement MGI 

related activity already underway at NIST, including its recently 

announced MGI Center of Excellence.

New commitments by private-sector and academic partners include:

 Launching an open Materials Data Facility pilot to boost data access and 

sharing. A consortium of research universities, national laboratories, and 

academic publishers are today announcing their intention to establish a 

Materials Data Facility Pilot as part of the National Data Service (NDS). In 

support of the Materials Genome Initiative, this new facility will enable 

greater community access to materials data with the goal of accelerating 

materials development and supporting advanced manufacturing. Key 

components of the NDS Materials Data Facility Pilot will include multipetabyte storage environments at the National Center for Supercomputer 
Applications (NCSA) at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and 

at Argonne National Laboratory, as well as the Globus research data 

management service operated by the University of Chicago.

 Establishing a new MGI Ambassadors program to strengthen the

national MGI network. The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) is 

committing to identify a ten individuals from across the country who are

well versed in the principles of MGI and have exhibited leadership in the 

materials-science field who will serve as regional points of contact for MGIrelated engagements, events, or inquiries. After nominations are received 

through the TMS website and the TMS Materials Innovation Committee,

MGI Ambassadors will be selected by the committee to ensure a balance of 

attributes. Final selections will be announced in late summer 2014.

 Documenting MGI-relevant collaborations in regions across the 

country. Today, five U.S. universities are releasing a new report

summarizing a series of regional workshops held during the third year of 

the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI). The workshops, held at 

Northeastern University, the University of Southern California, Rice 

University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Illinois 

at Urbana-Champaign, brought together academic researchers, leaders 

from industry, representatives from national laboratories, and 

government science and technology officials. The workshops aimed to

spur regional discussions and partnerships to address priority topics in 

the materials science field, including models for collaboration, scientific 

progress, facilities and infrastructure, data sharing, and education. The 

report presents a summary of those meetings along with 

recommendations about ways to advance the MGI.

 Expanding access to high-throughput materials development tools, data, 

and opportunities. Cornell University, the University of Maryland, the 

Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, the Critical Materials Institute, 

the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, Cornell High Energy 

Synchrotron Source, Duke University, Intermolecular, and the University 

of South Carolina are announcing new efforts to provide open-access 

software and data related to high-throughput materials development. The 

University of South Carolina will also grant free access to related facilities 

as well as a forthcoming online course on high-throughput techniques. In 

addition, the Materials Research Society will soon release a white paper

based on contributions from more than 90 experts, identifying key 

opportunities in high-throughput materials science that can further 

support the MGI’s goal of reducing time from lab to market.
 Establishing a new Center for Advanced Materials at Renssalaer 

Polytechnic Institute. Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute is building on its 

$15 million investment in ‘Materials by Design’ research platforms to 

support a new Center for Materials, Devices, and Integrated Systems. 

Rensselaer's priority research areas in the materials domain include new 

‘Big Data’ analytics of materials using supercomputers as well as 

advancing materials discovery and analysis with the IBM ‘Watson’ natural 

language capabilities.

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