The Materials Genome Initiative and the Democratization of Materials R&D

The US Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) is a multi-agency effort to accelerate the discovery, design, development, and deployment of new materials into manufactured products. The means to achieve this overarching goal is the Materials Innovation Infrastructure, a federated, yet tightly knit, interplay of computational, experimental and data resources. The creation of this infrastructure can be viewed as a means to lower the barrier to the application of state-of-the-art materials R&D approaches. The lower these barriers are made, the more the MGI will have successfully democratized these methods. Of course, to acheive this goal, any number of challenges must be overcome, and many of these challenges are of a more social and/or economic character. Here we will explore some of these issues within the broader context of MGI's goals, and delve into the strategies we are employing to overcome these barriers.