In his remarks to Carnegie Mellon University on June 24, 2011, Pres. Barack Obama said, “To help businesses discover, develop, and deploy new materials twice as fast, we’re launching what we call the Materials Genome Initiative.” On August 2, Prof. Tresa Pollock visited the White House for the fifth anniversary of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) to participate in presentations and panel discussions about the accomplishments and opportunities of the program.

The Pollock Research Group, in collaboration with GE and others, was directly mentioned for its accomplishments towards integrating experiment, computation, and theory. The document from NIST reads:

 “An NSF-funded team from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with General Electric and others, has designed and built a custom microscope that combines electron, ion, and laser beams to analyze new materials for defects at the nanometer scale in three dimensions. The addition of the laser is critical to speeding up the process of gathering the information, so what used to take six to nine months now takes only a couple of days. The microscope is key to the team’s development of new multilayered materials designed for high performance in extreme environments. In addition to developing new measurement methods, the team is pioneering the use of new modeling tools to speed up the development process and using advanced computer algorithms and “big data” analysis to hone designs before testing them.”

Also included in the document were two links to the research the Pollock Group has performed: an article for NSF’s Science Nation and a paper about the tribeam system.

The White House posted a blog article about the Materials Genome Initiative, as well, with the summary, “The MGI has already sparked a paradigm shift in how new materials are discovered, developed, and deployed.”