Dear NSC Community,
We have entered the age of informatics, data, and digitalisation. With the enormous growth of computing power, data acquisition and processing, we are looking forward to discovery of new patterns and laws, deeper understanding of the laws of nature with the help of computing, and introduction of new ways of computer-aided material design.
By now, we have thousands of physics-based models describing materials at different resolutions from quantum effects to gravitational waves in the Universe to but are only rarely able to derive the information of interest such as biocompatibility or toxicity from the first principles. To lay a foundation for informatics-driven approaches to addressing materials safety and sustainability, we need to be systematic in data generation, data processing and model annotation to establish connection between models at different resolutions.
While data-driven approaches in the form of statistical models and QSARs have been actively used by the nanosafety community, they are often merely black boxes that do not deliver the understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms of the biological activity of materials and insufficient to build mechanism-aware methods of risk assessment and materials design. I see my task in the widening the scope of informatics methods used in the field and connecting it to the enormous knowledge base of materials science and materials modelling.
I am looking forward to work together with all of you and particularly with my Co-Chairs Thomas Exner and Irini Furxhi.
Vladimir Lobaskin