The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected a consortium led by Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, to establish a new NIST-sponsored center of excellence for advanced materials research. The new Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD) also includes the University of Chicago, the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering, and the Computation Institute. The consortium also plans to work closely with QuesTek Innovations, a small business spin-off of Northwestern; ASM International, a well-known professional society of materials scientists; and Fayetteville State University.
The new center will focus on developing the next generation of computational tools, databases, and experimental techniques to enable “Materials by design,” which employs physical theory, advanced computer models, vast materials properties databases, and complex computations to accelerate the design of a new material with specific properties for a particular application, such as a biocompatible cell scaffold for medicine.
The new center’s work is expected to encompass both “hard” (inorganic) and “soft” (organic) advanced materials in fields as diverse as self-assembled biomaterials, smart materials for self-assembled circuit designs, organic photovoltaic materials, advanced ceramics and metal alloys.
