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

拟议研讨会的总体目标是发展一个基础广泛的材料创新社区，该社区全面看待材料科学、技术和社会影响，并将不同的参与者聚集在一起，形成专注于特定全球挑战的工作组。具体地说，该讲习班旨在将材料科学和制造业聚集在一起，加速将材料科学的新兴研究转化为具有社会意义和环境可持续性的应用。材料是一系列全球挑战的核心--既是应对挑战的答案，有时也是其来源。材料创新的重要性在过去十年中得到了持续的投资，包括美国的材料基因组计划(http://www.mgi.gov))和全球各地的相关努力(例如https://elements-strategy.jp/en/，https://www.nomad-coe.eu/).这次研讨会的目标是提出一个问题，即材料研究和开发应该如何转变，以最大限度地提高我们应对这些全球挑战的能力。这种转变还应该改变我们对材料创新的想法，从开发解决明确定义的问题(优化性能或优值系数)的点式解决方案，转变为包括不同声音、社会影响、可持续性和实际扩大的系统观点。许多全球性挑战需要材料创新。这包括创造新产业的一流创新(碳捕获、固氮、新型热电材料)，以及改造现有产业的二流创新(新型储能化学、轻质结构材料)。人工智能和量子计算等技术正在显示出显著加快基础材料发现速度的潜力。这些创新需要与全球规模经济分析、试点、放大、生命周期分析和采用相结合。成功地将所有这些部分整合在一起是一个复杂的挑战，不仅涉及学术界，还涉及工业、政府和非营利实体。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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 thatcreate new industries (carbon capture, nitrogen fixation, novel thermoelectrics) and also second-orderinnovations to transform existing industries (novel energy storage chemistries, light-weight structuralmaterials). Technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing are showing the potential tosignificantly increase the pace of fundamental materials discovery. These innovations need to becombined 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 butalso 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.