Objectives
The goal of this five-year project, Louisiana Alliance for Simulation-Guided Materials Applications (LA-SiGMA), is to position the State to compete for and secure a federally funded center of excellence in Louisiana. We will accomplish this by leveraging existing statewide computational, experimental, and intellectual assets.
LA-SiGMA will create a statewide research and education program focusing on (1) electronic materials, (2) energy materials, and (3) biomolecular materials. Within the overall theme of "computational materials science," these science drivers emerged as clear areas of strength through a statewide solicitation that yielded over forty multi-institutional whitepapers from teams of researchers. The majority of these teams included computational and experimental researchers, providing a strong foundation for the proposed research program that relies on close collaboration between theorists, computational scientists, and experimentalists. The Alliance capitalizes on the jurisdiction's Cyberinfrastructure (CI) and past investments in experimental and computational materials science. Program objectives include: building the next generation of experimentally validated formalisms, algorithms, and codes for multiscale materials simulations; implementing them on present and next generation supercomputers; and educating the next generation of a highly skilled workforce of materials scientists and engineers.
The value added by these efforts is a major transformation of education, research, and workforce development in the State with strong multi-institutional partnerships brought together to integrate:
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An education plan that includes new materials science graduate courses delivered across the State;
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Well-developed relationships between research universities, two-year colleges, and the K-12 community through ongoing outreach efforts;
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Strong partnerships between Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), two-year colleges, and other universities in the State;
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Involvement of predominantly undergraduate institutions as partners in research;
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A team focused on training students and researchers to fully utilize the next generation cyberinfrastructure (CI);
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Multifaceted diversity, workforce development, and external engagement plans including relationships with industries through researchers, industry liaisons, and the State EPSCoR Committee; and
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Rigorous evaluation and assessment by an external evaluator, and feedback through an External Review Board (ERB) to ensure that goals and objectives of the project are met.