Communications of the ACM
Government Support Key to Keeping Materials Engineering Competitive, Group Says
Credit: Keita Teranishi / Penn State University
Computational materials engineering must continue to grow for American corporations to stay globally competitive. This can only be accomplished by training a current workforce and creating a future labor pool with these skills through collaboration between industry, universities, and government, an industrial panel decided after a cooperative forum last week in Washington, D.C.
A gathering of professional societies, including The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), the American Ceramic Society, and ASM International, along with the University Materials Council, which is comprised of academic leaders in the materials field from the United States and Canada, co-sponsored the event titled, "Equipping the Next Generation Workforce for Materials Innovation: The Gateway to Manufacturing Competitiveness."
The industrial panel stated the United States is at a crucial point in the way that computational materials science can be used to enable advanced product manufacturing for global competitiveness. Their collective experience suggests it is difficult to find graduates — and even harder to find U.S. graduates — skilled in computational materials science. However, materials science education requires governmental support of the curriculum, as well as a partnership between academia and industry through internships, design projects, etc.
Speaker Gern Maurer (retired), Carpenter Technology Corp., pointed to the possibilities available through a joint effort. "This is a huge opportunity with huge challenges that we have to solve together," he said.
David Furrer, of Pratt & Whitney, another forum speaker, said government support was critical in building innovative success across all sectors. "There is a role for government to find ways for all parts of the Integrated Computational Materials Engineering supply chain to work together to solve and build an infrastructure in the U.S. It must be win-win for everyone — industry, small and large business, academia, government labs," he said.
"The use of computational materials modeling will be required for corporations to remain competitive. The increasing cost and pace of development, coupled with tightening specifications will require use of all the tools at our disposal," said speaker Amy L. Rovelstad, a research manager with Corning Inc.
Moderator and TMS member Kevin Hemker, of Johns Hopkins University, said it is time to move forward and work together. "We are at a tipping point in the way that computational materials science can be used to enable advanced product manufacturing and fuel American competitiveness. Our industrial panel articulated clear messages for the congressional offices that were assembled," he said.
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