Graduate student Kwasi Amofa is one of the leaders of the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute – Open Computing Facility (JUAMI-OCF), an effort to connect African scientists to state-of-the-art computing tools for materials discovery and innovation on a free-to-access Google Cloud platform.
JUAMI-OCF builds on a National Science Foundation-funded initiative to meet challenges related to reliable and sustainable energy in Africa. The open computing facility provides software critical to computational materials science and sustainability research, increases accessibility, and offers higher computational power than is typically available to graduate students on the African continent.
The student-led project — involving groups at Columbia University, UC Berkeley (led by Amofa), University of Michigan, Adama Science and Technology University, and Catholic University of Eastern Africa — have received a $60,000 grant through the Google Award for Inclusion Research program.
Their proposal, “Developing Accessible Educational and Research Resources for East African Graduate Students in Computational Materials Science and Sustainability,” is aimed at the development of accessible Density Functional Theory (DFT) capabilities to empower a pan-continental community of independent materials and sustainability researchers.