MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

New DMSE research may make it possible to produce tiny spectrometers that are just as accurate and powerful as full-size bench-top instruments but could be mass produced using standard chip-making processes. READ MORE

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Information about MIT's response to COVID-19

Informed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, MIT is acting to keep our community safe and stop the spread of COVID-19. The health and safety of students, faculty, staff, and their families are of the utmost importance to all of us — the situation is evolving and we will provide up-to-date information as we have it. MIT updates are posted at covid19.mit.edu. DMSE-specific information is linked below.

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Students pose in the facility's soft lithograpy space with technical instructor Scott Poesse

3.155/6.152: The first undergraduate users of MIT.nano

Last semester, MIT undergraduates completed the first-ever term of coursework done in MIT.nano. 3.155/6.152 (Micro/Nano Processing Technology) was co-sponsored by DMSE and EECS and co-taught by Jurgen Michel with 25 undergraduate and nine graduate students from seven different departments. The students learned nanofabrication by using research space and equipment throughout MIT.nano to make solar cells, MEMS cantilever beams, and microfluidic devices.

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DMSE and MIT graduate engineering ranked first by U.S. News for 2021

MIT's graduate program in engineering has again earned a No. 1 spot in U.S. News and Word Report’s annual rankings, and DMSE again placed first in the individual engineering disciplines. We are so proud that our wonderful students and faculty are recognized

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Deep learning for mechanical property evaluation

A standard method for testing some of the mechanical properties of materials is to poke them with a sharp point. This “indentation technique” can provide detailed measurements of how the material responds to the point’s force, as a function of its penetration depth. But while indentation techniques, including nanoindentation, work well for measuring some properties, they exhibit large errors when probing plastic properties of materials. An international team has developed a new analytical technique that can improve the estimation of mechanical properties of metallic materials from instrumented indention, with as much as 20 times greater accuracy than existing methods. Ming Dao is the co-lead and senior author of this paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combining indentation experiments with computational modeling of materials using the latest machine learning tools.

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Spotlight

Developing new ways to advance copper production

Copper and sulfur are two products of a new electrochemical process that the Allanore group has proposed, which converts natural sulfide minerals into liquid copper and elemental sulfur. Copper is the backbone of the electronic area we live in, and is predicted to support the deployment of sustainable power generation. Sulfur is an essential chemical element, source of power, acids or sulfates such as used in agriculture.

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Imitating mussels to create strong hydrogels

MIT researchers have found a way to create strong, flexible threads by imitating the natural ability of mussels. During the 2019 Materials Research Society fall meeting, grad student Sean Cazzell presented his and Professor Niels Holten-Andersen's findings, which could potentially have use in advanced 3D printing of synthetic tissues and other biomedical applications.

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