Dynamics of a Cross-disciplinary Corporate-Sponsored Undergraduate Computer Science Project

This paper focuses on the interactions between an undergraduate student computer science group, an undergraduate chemistry student, a computer science professor, and industry leaders in computational chemistry.We discuss our initial experiences to build a cross-disciplinary project team whose goal is to contribute to an open source software tool used by scientists for polymer discovery. I. INTRODUCTIONCCELERATED material discovery is at the core of innovation, economic opportunities, and global competitiveness.The research process is responsible for bringing new materials to market.In 2011, President Obama launched the U.S. Material Genome Initiative (MGI) and challenged researchers, policy makers, and business leaders to reduce the time and resources needed to bring new materials to market-a process that today can take 20 years or more.There is great potential in leveraging modern data mining, big data analytics techniques, and physics based modeling (high performance computing) to significantly shorten the Research & Development cycle in material sciences.Polymers, as an important part of materials science, are the focus of many research fields such as semiconductors (e.g.low-k dielectrics, photolithography, and directed self-assembly),