What is CoSMIC?

Information technology presents a profound opportunity for real-time sharing of materials knowledge. Through global collaborations coupled to the evolution of new research and development paradigms it is possible to accelerate the process of materials discovery and design on behalf of all participants in the international materials community. In order to accomplish this task, one needs to develop the proper tools to support and integrate computational materials science with reliable data (i.e. informatics) with a highly efficient structured design of experiments (i.e. combinatorial experimentation) and make them easily accessible to the international materials science community.

"Science was originally empirical, like Leonardo, making wonderful drawings of nature. Next came the theorists who tried to write down the equations that explained the observed behaviors, like Kepler or Einstein. Then when we got to complex enough systems like the clustering of a million galaxies, there came the computer simulations, the computational branch of science. Now we are getting into the data exploration part of science, which is kind of a little bit of them all" - From Dr. Alex Szalay of the Virtual Observatory Project on the New York Times, May 20, 2003 The CoSMIC IMI addresses the issue of the data exploration part of Materials Science–the next phase of the scientific discovery process.

The Combinatorial Sciences and Materials Informatics Collaboratory (CoSMIC) is an international research and education center promoting the use of informatics and combinatorial experimentation for materials discovery and design. It operates through a cyber-infrastructure for global collaboration among researchers and educators. CoSMIC has been initiated composed of an international consortium of universities and laboratories. The program is based at Iowa State University with its United States partners at Florida International University and University of Maryland. The center is sponsored by the National Science Foundation as one of the founding centers of the new International Materials Institute program of NSF. The other institutes are based at Princeton University and the University of Tennessee.

Project director:
Professor Krishna Rajan: Iowa State University

Co- principal investigators:
Professor Surendra Saxena: Florida International University
Professor Gary Rubloff: University of Maryland
Professor Ichiro Takeuchi: University of Maryland