Materials research and development today still depends primarily on scientific intuitions, experiences, as well as trial-anderror experiments. This process is time-consuming and costly, and has increasingly become the bottleneck for technological and social advancement. In June 2011, President Obama of the United State announced Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) as part of Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, aiming to accelerate process from materials discovery, development, manufacturing, and deployment process and cut the cost at the same time by integrating computational materials design, high-throughput experimentation, and data management. China began to show great interest in more efficient materials research and development as early as June 1999 by organizing the 118th Xiangshan Science Forum on Integrated Combinatorial Approaches for Materials Discovery and Optimization. In December 2011, The S14 Xiangshan Science Forum on System Engineering in Materials Science was jointly sponsored by Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), in response to the MGI. In addition, a series of conferences and forums were held across the nation from 2012 to 2014, to discuss MGI and China's strategy. A consensus has been reached among Chinese materials community including universities, industry, and research institutions. Both CAS and CAE submitted Strategic Consultation Report on Materials Genome to the State Council of China in 2014, respectively, proposing to launch China's Materials Genome Program as soon as possible. In this article, we introduce the basic concepts of MGI, review the global progress and trends, and make recommendations on the national policy, strategy and technological pathways of China's Materials Genome Program.

materials genomics  /  Materials Genome Initiative  /  high-throughput experimentation  /  computational materials design  /  materials data management