Prof. Kristin Persson of the Materials Project – Building a Global Materials Informatics Platform

Summary: This episode focuses on Prof. Kristin Persson’s work directing the Materials Project, where she had her group have built an open-source materials informatics platform that reaches over 75,000 users worldwide.

In this episode, Dr. Bryce Meredig and Prof. Persson discuss:

• The founding of the Materials Project and how it has grown into a widely used global open-source platform
• Recruiting and supporting a multidisciplinary group that touches materials science, chemistry, high-performance computing, and scalable web development
• The motivation for making all Materials Project data, applications, and algorithms open-source
• Success stories from the scientific community’s use of the Materials Project
• How researchers can best integrate computational methods with machine learning, lab-based synthesis and characterization, and commercial R&D

“We’re building a community. In the end, the goal [of Materials Project] is to make our data and algorithms available to the public so we can accelerate materials design and accelerate solutions to some of our societal problems in renewable energy.” - Dr. Kristin Persson

Prof. Kristin Persson is the Director of the Materials Project, a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC-Berkeley. Known as a pioneer of materials genomics, Kristin co-founded the Materials Project in 2011 with Gerbrand Ceder at MIT. The Materials Project is now a multi-institution, multi-national effort to compute the properties of all known materials and to provide the data, analysis algorithms, and computational materials applications free of charge to the scientific community. The Materials Project aims to accelerate innovation in materials research, and has led to the discovery of new battery materials, transparent conducting oxides, and thermoelectric materials. Prof. Persson is the recipient of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Early Career Award for Women in Science, the 2013 LBNL Director’s Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and the TMS 2017 Early Career Faculty Fellow Award. She was also a 2018 Kavli Fellow.

Dr. Bryce Meredig, is the host of DataLab: The Materials Informatics Podcast, and Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Citrine Informatics. Dr. Meredig researches the application of machine learning to materials science. He earned his PhD in materials science from Northwestern University, where he focused on materials informatics, and his BAS and MBA at Stanford University, where he is also on the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications, including some of the earliest on applying machine learning (ML) to materials development. He was an Arjay Miller Scholar and Terman Fellow at Stanford, and a Presidential Fellow and NDSEG Fellow at Northwestern.

Connect with Bryce:

Twitter: @brycemeredig

Website: Citrine.io