NSF Convergence Accelerator Workshop -- Accelerating Translational Materials R&D for Global Challenges

The overarching goal of the proposed workshop is the development of a broad-based materials innovation community that takes a holistic view of materials science, technology, and social impact and that brings together diverse participants to nucleate working groups focused around specific global challenges. Specifically, the workshop aims to bring together the materials science and manufacturing communities to accelerate the translation of emerging research in materials science towards applications of societal significance and with environmental sustainability.

Materials are at the heart – both the answer to, and sometimes the source of – a broad range of global challenges. The importance of materials innovation has been recognized with sustained investment over the past decade, including programs such as the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) in the US (http://www.mgi.gov) and related efforts around the globe (e.g., https://elements-strategy.jp/en/, https://www.nomad-coe.eu/).

The goal of this workshop is to ask the question of how materials research and development should be transformed to maximize our ability to address those global challenges. This transformation should also change our idea of materials innovation from the development of a point solution that solves a well-defined problem (optimizing performance or figure of merit) to a systems view that includes diverse voices, societal impacts, sustainability, and practical scale-up.

Many global challenges need materials innovation. This includes first-order innovations that create new industries (carbon capture, nitrogen fixation, novel thermoelectrics) and also second-order innovations to transform existing industries (novel energy storage chemistries, light-weight structural materials). Technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing are showing the potential to

significantly increase the pace of fundamental materials discovery. These innovations need to be combined with global scale – economic analysis, piloting, scale-up, lifecycle analysis, and adoption. Putting all these pieces together successfully is a complex challenge that involves not just academia but

also industrial, government, and non-profit entities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.