6th WMRIF General Assembly 

The 6th WMRIF General Assembly celebrated its 10th anniversary at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, U.S.A. on September 14 to 16, 2015.

The event organized by the colleagues of Lawrence Livermore was accompanied by the symposium Computational Materials Sciences, Characterization and “Critical Materials”.
Highlights of the 6th WMRIF GA&Symposium

The meeting started on Monday, September 14, 2015 with the 6th WMRIF General Assembly.
Agenda of the GA.

  • Bearing in mind  the words of a German philosopher “Those who want to plan the future should look into the past and define the actual position” we took a look at the accomplishments of the past ten years and assess the challenges of the time to come.
  • A central point was the discussion of and agreement on the “10 Major Trends in Materials Science and Engineering” (password protected) which we started at the most successful meeting at EMPA, Switzerland in 2013. They have been published on the WMRIF homepage after revision by the GA.
  • We shared experience of technology transfer by founding new companies and exchange ideas  for strengthening collaboration on topics of mutual interest. In this context KIMS has sent information, recently.
  • As a further act towards the future and as stated in the founding declaration of WMRIF, the presidency should be moved every four years. The General Assembly voted for Dr. Laurie E. Locascio, Director of NIST MML, as its next president.

On September 15 and 16, 2015 the General Assembly included the interested MS&E community in the WMRIF Symposium. In three consecutive sessions representatives of the WMRIF member institutes and invited experts discussed these current hot topics in materials science and engineering: Advances in Materials Informatics The session ighlighted approaches to improve predicative structural and compositional control, assembly, or scale-up particularly in multi material composites at the meso- to micro- scale that exploit emergent behavior or cooperative effects between distinct material classes. Novel and emerging approaches This session highlighted novel methods in synthesis, assembly, and scale up that could enable the realization of new properties or a fundamental reduction in the time from discovery to deployment. “Critical” materials This session highlighted advances in the development or discovery of material substitutes or recycling or re-use technologies that can alter the economics for the so-called “Critical” Materials that are critical to the widespread adoption of new clean energy technologies.
Agenda of the symposium.