Nanoinformatics: Data-Driven Materials Design for Health and Environmental Needs

This chapter explores the challenges in leveraging data-driven strategies to design engineered nanomaterials in the context of emerging nanotechnology environmental health and safety risks. A wealth of data is emerging on the potential toxicity of engineered nanomaterials, and the value of using informatics methods to unravel the complexity of that information is reviewed. This overview is followed by a discussion of case studies on how emerging data mining/informatics methods can help identify critical characteristics at the nanoscale that may have implications on the health or environmental impact of engineered nanomaterials. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the concept of "Big Data" can help develop a data-guided decision framework to help link fundamental behaviors observed at the nanoscale to possible health and environmental effects that may become manifest at the macroscale.