UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A team of researchers at Penn State was awarded a $3 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a graduate training program designed to equip the next generation of engineers and scientists with the tools required to affect transformative change in sustainable materials processing.
The new five-year grant — titled “Data science-driven, sustainability-centered advanced materials processing,” or Sus-Mat — is one of 15 grants recently awarded across the country through the NSF’s Research Traineeship (NRT) program.
The primary goal of Sus-Mat is to develop a traineeship program that will pioneer a new educational paradigm that natively integrates data science into sustainable materials and process design, according to principal investigator Allison Beese, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. She explained that this would enable consideration of the full life cycle of materials while accelerating the design and adoption of new materials and manufacturing methods, supporting U.S. economic resilience.
“Our vision is to produce leaders who will revolutionize sustainable advanced materials processing,” Beese said. “We want our students to be leaders in harnessing artificial intelligence (AI), data science tools and machine learning, to understand the connections between materials composition, processing routes and properties. The element of public policy, woven throughout the training and research of Sus-Mat, will help ensure students are able to convey the impact of their research to the broader public to affect change.”
How the world manufactures everything, from cars and medical devices to batteries and houses, is necessarily evolving in the face of environmental and geopolitical dynamics, Beese said, and Sus-Mat aims to create leaders who will define these solutions.
“Dr. Beese’s leadership in advanced materials processing and data-driven design exemplifies the innovative spirit of Penn State,” said John Mauro, professor and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Her ability to integrate sustainability, data science and cutting-edge manufacturing will transform how we educate the workforce of tomorrow, enabling new and innovative solutions for the American materials industry.”
Beese, who also directs Penn State’s additive manufacturing and design graduate programs, pointed to evolving manufacturing approaches as an opportunity for better engineering education.
“For decades, engineers and scientists have been trained to rely on static materials property handbooks for material selection, where properties are naively defined solely by composition, assuming conventional processing methods,” Beese said. “With the emergence of advanced manufacturing processes that have an increasing number of design variables, the problem is multidimensional and dynamic such that static handbooks are no longer suitable for identifying material properties. The integration of sustainability and data science methods explicitly designed for understanding processing effects on materials properties will provide a new paradigm for innovative education and research in advanced materials processing technologies.”
Sus-Mat is distinct from existing NRTs in that it focuses on sustainability-driven advanced processing of materials and explicitly integrates social science, according to Beese.
“Compared to current NRTs focused on material design, we take an end-to-end view of the material lifecycle, with explicit consideration of manufacturing process and societal and environmental impact,” Beese said. “We typically don't teach our students about the full life cycles of materials; however, through this NRT, we will be very intentional in ensuring students think up front about the entire life cycle of a component: from sourcing, manufacturing, use and disposal, re-use or recycling at the end of product life.”
The Sus-Mat cohort-based training program will develop a new convergent graduate certificate, “Data-Driven Sustainable Design for Circularity in Advanced Materials Processing,” and digital badges providing foundations in Sus-Mat themes to trainees and learners at and beyond Penn State. Additionally, students will participate in professional development activities, internships and a capstone experience.
“Our graduate certificate will have courses from multiple colleges across Penn State,” Beese said. “This will be one path we will use to educate students across disciplines. We also will develop new micro-credentials or digital badges that are able to very rapidly give learners at and beyond Penn State in the Sus-Mat themes.
A total of 50 graduate students will be trained in Sus-Mat, and many additional students will directly benefit from one or more program elements during the five-year period, Beese explained.
“This program advances so many University objectives: inter-college collaboration, fluency in AI and sustainability principles for graduate students and student career-readiness,” said Lee Kump, the John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. “Dr. Beese and her team are to be commended for their success in a very challenging funding environment.”
NSF’s NRT program is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary or convergent research areas, through a comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.
Sus-Mat includes faculty from Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, College of Engineering, College of the Liberal Arts and the College of Arts and Architecture.
Co-principal investigators on the project include Emily Pakhtigian, assistant professor of public policy and Jeffrey L. and Sharon D. Hyde-McCourtney Career Development Professor; Wesley Reinhart, assistant professor of materials science and engineering; Rui Shi, assistant professor of chemical engineering; Benay Gürsoy Toykoç, associate professor of architecture; Debarati Das, assistant professor of computer science and engineering; Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering; and Bryan Vogt, professor of chemical engineering.