The Air Force Research Laboratory, in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Science Foundation, have awarded the top prize for the Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge to the team of Surya Kalidindi, Joshua Gomberg, and Andrew Medford.

The Challenge sought solutions for new uses of publicly accessible digital data to advance materials science and engineering knowledge to accelerate the transition to industrial applications. Kalidindi's winning project "Structure-based energy models from simulated Al grain boundary datasets" proposes new methods to extract information from atomistic simulations to predict the energy of defects in materials.