Accelerating material development by connecting scientific fields
A manifesto for Material Development
In the past months we all experienced radical changes in our lives. Researchers all around the world are uniting efforts and sharing knowledge in order to address and find solutions for the current pandemic.
Anything new – vaccine, medicine, technology – takes time and money to develop.
The present context, however, is showing us that we can accelerate innovation through collaborative effort.
Material Pioneers has raised inspiration from this and wants to generate the same agility for the much-needed development of materials science field.
Thanks to the open discussions we have had during the webinars, In this Manifesto we have identified four main directions that need to be addressed and promoted in order to speed up materials development and make science more open, collaborative and accessible.
Our aim is to lead a culture shift in material science research to encourage and facilitate an integrated team approach.
New advanced materials are at the centre of any major challenge we will be facing in the coming decades and they are essential to our economic security and human wellbeing, with applications in industries aimed at addressing challenges in clean energy, national security, and human welfare.
Only for the development of new electrocatalysts, millions of new materials need to be analysed. If you extrapolate this to materials for solar cells, batteries and thermoelectric materials, materials subject to supply disruptions, like rare earth metals it is clea r that this will be putting huge pressure on material researchers in the coming years.
We want to create a new way of collaboration, resources and infrastructure to support scientists and researchers in the effort to discover, manufacture and develop new materials.
And we can only do so by promoting a paradigm shift in the way the community science conducts research and development presently.Although collaboration is extensive and productive it is usually restricted in teams of researchers with similar expertise in theory, experiment, or simulation. If we could move our work towards a more seamless integration of theory, materials characterization, synthesis, processing and computational modelling we could become even more productive.
