Conference: WORKSHOP ON SCIENTIFIC OPPORTUNITIES AND INSTRUMENTATION NEEDS FOR NEXT GENERATION MATERIALS GENOMICS BASED MATERIALS RESEARCH IN MATERIALS WITH LONG RANGE ORDER

This award supports a proposed workshop to bring together visionaries from Materials Science synthesis and characterization fields to explore scientific opportunities offered by the emergence of the 5th paradigm of science: AI and data enabled discovery with automation and autonomation of experiments. The context is materials discovery within the framework of the current Materials Genome Initiative strategic plan, to identify the technological, economic, and sociological challenges that will have to be overcome, and propose a path forward that will allow the US to excel and lead in this emerging area. Products of the workshop will be archives of the workshop materials, a consensus report, and a public facing journal article that summarizes the motivation and findings coming from the meeting. The focus of this meeting will be limited to materials described as having long-range order, but more specifically materials exemplified by bulk crystals, epitaxial films, 2-dimensional materials, Quantum Materials, and Van der Waals materials, but not soft materials or structural materials that will be covered in two other related workshops. The workshop will explore concrete steps needed to enable the development of 5th generation scientific research in materials discovery in the US community. The intellectual merit of the activity is to identify early scientific opportunities and map out what investments, organizations, bureaucracies, education, and training, that need to be put into place for the US materials community to take advantage of these emerging opportunities. It will result in reports and journal articles that lay out the current understanding of the community on opportunities and needs and a vision for how this could move forward with an emphasis on short-term actionable items. Accelerating the discovery and adoption of new materials provides potentially transformative benefits to all people. A broader impact of this proposed activity is to build foundations for greatly accelerated materials discovery capabilities. 5th-Generation scientific research is an inherently multi-investigator, multi-expertise, multi-discipline convergent research activity. The workshop will also be to identify how to develop, train, and retain a diverse future workforce for operating in this teaming environment.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.