FAIRmat and NOMAD: Recent Developments and Future Directions

This talk was given on June 16, 2026, a the kickoff presentation of the FAIRmat Users Meeting (https://events.fairmat-nfdi.eu/event/50). In this overview talk, we present recent developments across FAIRmat and the NOMAD ecosystem, highlighting the continued growth of the platform as a research data infrastructure for materials science. FAIRmat now supports a broad range of research activities, from individual projects and laboratory workflows to institutional data management and collaborative research environments. The presentation showcases recent advances across the ecosystem, including improvements to data management, metadata handling, workflow support, data exploration, and deployment options. Through selected examples, we demonstrate how these developments help researchers and organizations manage research data more effectively while enabling FAIR and reproducible research practices. The talk concludes with an outlook on the next phase for FAIRmat and NOMAD, highlighting emerging capabilities, expanding application areas, and the growing role of FAIR research data in data-driven and AI-based scientific discovery. This work is funded by the NFDI consortium FAIRmat - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project 460197019.