Building a vivid community is the primary ambition of the Molecular and Material Design Technology hub. Coordination and support actions for strengthening connections, visibility, and creating and nurturing the community with events and get togethers organized at a lively physical meeting place where MMD fellows, project leaders link up to stakeholders in Amsterdam and beyond.

To this end there will be collaborations with eg. Sustainalab, where Faculty of Science researchers can meet and interact at a fixed moment in the week, located in Matrix One in close proximity of highly specialized labs at the various Faculty of Science institutes (IOP, HIMS, SILS, IBED). The MMD hub will seek strategic collaborations with major tech, chemical and material companies worldwide, and create public–private partnerships using e.g. the ICAI model as a best practice example, and will also build strong relationships within the Amsterdam Ecosystem both in education (e.g. with HvA, VU, UMC Amsterdam and AMOLF), in co-creation with companies located in the Amsterdam region, and in national and international consortia.

The MMD Impulse call aims to establish and further strengthen emerging collaborations that combine theoretical, experimental, analytical/instrumentation and computational expertise in the field of molecular and material design. Small grants from 50-150 k€ each, directed towards combinations of tenured scholars, will help establish already emerging collaborations. The focus is on developing new ideas to a next phase, for instance by proof-of-concepts. The proposed research should focus on molecular and material design creating impact in the Faculty of Science themes Health and/or Green. Applications should contribute to accelerating change through initiatives that are not yet happening elsewhere in Faculty of Science and/or are not easily funded via other channels.

By investing in a dedicated MMD compute support team we aim to empower researchers by providing them with the necessary infrastructure, tools, and expertise to efficiently collect, manage, analyze, and visualize data. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies and best practices in data engineering, this team aims to accelerate the research and enable breakthrough discoveries across various domains.

The MMD compute support team will collaborate closely with researchers across various disciplines to understand their data needs and requirements. The team will also closely collaborate with the IT department and UvA Data Science Center to leverage existing infrastructure, resources, and expertise in implementing data engineering solutions. The mechanisms by which they will work is through a voucher system connected to MMD impulse or other projects

In MMD Data we aim for investments that contribute to closing ‘data gaps’ in the envisioned scientific discovery cycles. This could be to facilitate seamless and automated data extraction and sharing from highly specialized experimental infrastructure, relying as much as possible on standardized data formats, facilitating high-throughput data acquisition, and automatically feeding into downstream computational workflows. And vice-versa, to facilitate direct coupling of output from computational workflows to steer experiments, again in an automated fashion. This should lead to fully closed and automated high-throughput discovery cycles, but also to ‘data and workflow’ lakes that store all data, computational models, and workflows in dedicated repositories and facilitate their re-use.

MMD Data will work closely together with MMD Compute. Investments in MMD Data still need to be specified but are will be in required infrastructure (e.g. software or hardware). Initiatives funded in the MMD Impulse program are expected to closely work together in the creation of standardized data types and to define and work towards the MMD data lake. A strong link to the UvA Data Centre is envisioned.