By Brittany Ngo for Intellectual Property Watch
The Obama administration and academic and industry partners today announced their commitment to support the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a public-private endeavor whose aim is to reduce the time required to develop novel materials that can “fuel advanced manufacturing and bolster the 21st century American economy.”
MGI was launched two years ago, and is overseen by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The initiative commits the US government to “work with industry and academic researchers to double the pace of development of advanced materials to meet a range of national goals.”
New commitments include $25 million over 5 years from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to form a Center of Excellence on Advanced Materials, a collaborative environment and concentration of technical capability to accelerate materials discovery and development, according to OSTP.
NIST will also collaborate with ASM International (a society for materials scientists) to establish an open, digital repository of materials data. Several US universities have also started nationwide dialogue on building an “Innovation Accelerator Network” to better connect with other MGI-related activities.
Data-sharing is a core principle of MGI as different institutions increase their efforts to share and learn from within and across sectors. Based on the data-sharing experiences from the Human Genome Project, a key function of MGI is to coordinate federal materials science research across agencies and sectors to develop and share basic materials science discovery data to accelerate innovation.
Information on new commitments is here [pdf].
More information about MGI is here.
Brittany Ngo is currently completing her Master’s in Health Policy and Global Health at the Yale School of Public Health and previously obtained a Bachelor’s of Arts in Economics from Georgetown University. Through her studies she has developed an interest in health-related intellectual property issues. She is a summer intern at Intellectual Property Watch.