The Materials group is engaged in highly interdisciplinary materials research to drive new innovations to solve critical societal problems in areas such as energy and healthcare, among others.
Research Topics
- Materials for Healthcare Applications: Exciting developments over the last decade of materials-based technologies for diagnostics and therapeutic applications include lab-on-a-chip devices, understanding the mechanical behavior of biomaterials, regeneration of bone and cartilage, and novel scintillating materials for next generation of detectors for medical imaging.
- Materials for Energy and Environment: This research focuses on materials related to clean energy conversion, including solid oxide fuel cells, membrane based environmentally friendly processing of energy-intensive metals, hydrogen generation and storage, carbon dioxide separation for sequestration, advanced coatings for clean energy generation, and waste to energy conversion technologies.
- Materials Theory and Modeling: Ongoing research is focused on predictive simulation of electronic, optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties of materials, and multi-scale modeling of biological composites.
- Materials at the Micro/Nano Scale: Mechanical behavior of MEMS/NEMS devices, physics of ultra-thin metal films, and development of polymeric micro/nano-biosystems for in-situ study of cellular and sub-cellular mechanics.
Faculty
- Abigail Plummer (Computation, Experiment, Theory)
- Chuanhua Duan (Computation, Experiment)
- Emily Ryan (Computation, Machine Learning)
- Gregory McDaniel (Computation, Experiment, Machine Learning, Theory)
- James Bird (Computation, Experiment, Theory)
- James Chapman (Computation, Machine Learning, Theory)
- Joerg Werner (Experiment)
- Keith Brown (Experiment, Machine Learning)
- Scott Bunch (Experimental)
- Sean Lubner (Experiment, Machine Learning, Theory)
- Soumendra Basu (Computation, Experiment)
- Thomas Bifano (Computation, Design, Experiment, Machine Learning, Theory)
- William Boley (Design, Experiment, Machine Learning, Theory)