DFT@JUAMI-OCF

A student-led project involving groups at University of California - Berkeley, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Adama Science and Technology University (Ethiopia), the Catholic University of Eastern Africa (Kenya), and Columbia University have been awarded a $60,000 grant through the Google Research Award for Inclusion Research Program to connect African scientists to state of the art computing tools for materials discovery and innovation on a free-to-access Google Cloud Platform named the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute - Open Computing Facility (JUAMI-OCF).

Their proposal, titled “Developing Accessible Educational and Research Resources for East African Graduate Students in Computational Materials Science and Sustainability”, is aimed at the co-development, between researchers in East Africa and the United States, of accessible Density Functional Theory (DFT) capabilities that will enable high impact computational materials and sustainability research.

This project aims to empower a pan-continental community of independent materials and sustainability researchers via increased accessibility to DFT calculations, a type of electronic structure calculation using a material’s crystal structure to predict its properties and applications prior to a costly and uncertain synthesis procedure. DFT is an important tool allowing materials researchers to understand and explore material properties, but requires significant computational resources and expertise that are not universally available, especially in Africa. To accomplish their aims, the team plans to use the funds acquired from Google Research to build accessible onboarding tools for meaningful DFT calculations, organize educational workshops on the use of this tool, and foster a collaborative US and East African community of DFT users.

“This grant from Google completely changes the game in what we can do and produce. It will allow us to use many computational techniques, including density functional theory, to further drive innovation” said Carlos Biaou, R&D Engineer at GAF Energy, former UC Berkeley grad student and Co-founder of JUAMI-OCF. Dinsefa Mensur, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Adama Science and Technology University, Ethiopia noted “our short-term goal will be to train three postgraduate students at Adama with the JUAMI-OCF team and facility to acquire the necessary computational skills and knowledge to screen potential electronic materials for photovoltaic applications.” The team will organize a mini-symposium on electronic materials for photovoltaic applications to establish collaboration and foster networking with university professors and researchers in East Africa and the US. “In the long term, we want to establish a computational materials science and sustainability program covering all of East Africa,” said Mensur. Jaylyn C. Umana, Columbia University undergraduate researcher and DFT infrastructure developer added “I feel that with the opportunity this funding from Google lays before us, I can realize my vision of building capabilities for a group of folks who I know are genuinely excited to get acquainted with DFT in a similar way that I was when I was first starting out.” James Sifuna, from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, noted that the grant will go a long way in providing computational resources to disadvantaged groups in Eastern Africa. “At the moment, it is very difficult to do meaningful research without collaborations. Thanks to this grant, we can now target to train more people in DFT using the JUAMI-OCF resources”, said Sifuna.

The proposal is led by a team composed of Professor Simon Billinge (Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University), Professor Dinsefa Mensur (Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Adama Science and Technology University, Ethiopia), James Sifuna (A researcher at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Kenya), Jaylyn C. Umana (Physics and Mathematics Undergraduate Student Researcher at Columbia University), Brian Iezzi (Materials Science and Engineering Graduate Student Researcher at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor), Muhammad Abdullah (Mechanical Engineering and Environment and Sustainability Graduate Student Researcher at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor), and Kwasi Amofa (Bioengineering Graduate Student Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley). A great team indeed!