Initiative On Novel Materials Gets Boost

The Materials Genome Initiative will get an additional $150 million to create new materials for manufacturing, the White House announced last week. The initiative aims to cut the time it takes to move a new material from the lab to industry and make more materials available through improved use of computer modeling, experimentation, and data. The government has already invested $250 million since the multiagency program was first announced in June 2011. The new funding will come from the current budgets of five agencies. Also part of the White House manufacturing announcement was a push to streamline entrepreneurs’ and innovators’ access to sophisticated research tools at 700 federal R&D facilities.