Troy, N.Y. - Rensselaer has been awarded a five-year $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish an International Materials Institute (IMI) for Materials Informatics and Combinatorial Materials Science. It is one of the first centers of its kind to be awarded funding by the NSF.

Housed at Rensselaer, the Combinatorial Sciences and Materials Informatics Collaboratory (CoSMIC) will develop leading-edge experimental and computational tools for the high-speed discovery of radically new materials and processes. University partners include the University of Maryland, and Florida International University - the nation's leading Hispanic serving institution.

The research goal of Rensselaer's CoSMIC-IMI is to produce radically new materials engineered from atomic scale design right to final application needs. Examples include the development of new magnetic materials capable of storing huge amounts of data - far beyond what is currently conceivable today - or the next-generation ultra-high temperature materials for more efficient, cleaner engines in nearly every transportation sector.

"This award confirms Rensselaer as a major player in the area of materials science," said Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson. "The Institute has long been conducting research at the leading edge of materials science and engineering at the intersection of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology. This center binds these disciplines together on a global level that is expected to result in rapid, important scientific advancements."

The Global Laboratory
Using the INTERNET2, Rensselaer's CoSMIC-IMI will connect a consortium of laboratories from ten countries across Europe, Japan, the Middle East, South America, Canada, and the United States. These laboratories are world leaders in materials theory and modeling, materials science databases, high throughput experimentation techniques and combinatorial materials synthesis and processing.

"We want to do for materials science what The Human Genome Project did for biotechnology," says Krishna Rajan, director of Rensselaer's IMI and a professor of materials science and engineering, and of information technology. "This is information technology in direct application to scientific research and experimentation."

"The concept of "discovery" is not limited only to the idea of a radical discovery of a new material, but in a larger sense to discover new possibilities of materials behavior, materials processing and to suggest new avenues for theoretical development," says Rajan.

Examples of work planned in the center include: Searching for the basic set of building blocks of chemical, microstructural and processing information necessary for new materials design; developing new processing pathways for multifunctional materials which can be used in sensors and microelectronic devices; and developing ways to incorporate microstructural information in a quantitative manner into combined experiments and informatics-based design of new materials.

Research Collaboration, Not Competition
"The CoSMIC-IMI represents a new way of conducting academic research in the U.S.," says Art Sanderson, vice president for research at Rensselaer. "Rensselaer and its partner universities have marshaled their IT resources to solve pressing challenges in materials science. Through global collaboration, rather than competition, universities can take advantage of the best instrumentation, the best minds, and the best students."

Combinatorial experiments and high throughput screening techniques, while widely used for instance in the drug discovery field of the pharmaceutical industry, are less pervasive in materials science, yet have the potential to significantly enhance materials engineering around the globe.

In order to realize the goal of accelerated materials discovery, one needs to apply appropriate information science methods, such as informatics, to integrate computational materials science with reliable data, says Rajan. Additionally, there must be a highly efficient structured design of experiments.

"Through global collaboration with our international partners it is now possible to accelerate the process of materials discovery and design on behalf of all participants in the international materials community," says Rajan

Rajan notes that an additional aim of the IMI, is the establishment of an international educational infrastructure accessible through a web-based portal. This portal is necessary to support the training of a new scientific workforce that is well-versed in the skills of both the materials and information sciences.

Along with international partners, the CoSMIC -IMI will be aided by participation of numerous government laboratories, industries, professional societies and international agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

Contact: Theresa Bourgeois
Phone: (518) 276-2840
E-mail: bourgt@rpi.edu