Prof. KT Ramesh Represents Materials Research at White House Event

When glancing at one’s calendar, it’s rare for most people to see a note about attending a closed event at the White House. Yet, for mechanical engineering professor KT Ramesh and civil engineering professor Somnath Ghosh, that’s what they saw a few weeks ago. The pair joined senior Administration officials from the White House, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and National Science Foundation, along with leading technical experts from industry, academia, and government at an event at the White House on Tuesday, August 2nd to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI).

President Obama announced the creation of MGI in June of 2011, “to help businesses discover, develop, and deploy new materials twice as fast.” Professors Ramesh and Ghosh lead two research consortiums that support this effort.

Professor Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science & Engineering and Director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, represented Johns Hopkins University and the eleven research institutions that create the Materials in Extreme Dynamic Environment (MEDE) program.

Professor Ghosh, the Michael G. Callas Professor of Civil Engineering and Director of JHU Center for Integrated Structure-Materials Modeling & Simulation (CISMMS), attended the event as the Director of the Air Force Center of Excellence on Integrated Materials Modeling (CEIMM). He is also a HEMI faculty member who is involved with the MEDE program.

MEDE is one of the Department of Defense’s largest MGI programs. Sponsored through the Army Research Laboratory, it focuses on protection materials and provides new ways to tightly integrate experiments, computation, and theory. Johns Hopkins is the lead research organization for the MEDE program and, under the direction of Professor Ramesh, collaborates with the Army Research Laboratory to advance the fundamental understanding of materials in extreme dynamic environments while also developing a materials-by-design capability for protection materials.

CEIMM is a multi-institutional research and education consortium that has created a collaborative research and educational program to foster foundational advances in computational and experimental methodologies, supporting the Integrated Computational Materials Science & Engineering or ICMSE theme.

The MGI is changing the paradigm of how materials are discovered, developed, and deployed. MEDE and CEIMM ensure that the next generation of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs has the training they need to embrace the new paradigm created via MGI.