MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Professor Jennifer Rupp's lab works with solid-state materials for energy and information devices, including batteries, neuromorphic memory and computing logic. READ MORE

What’s New

$Stacking faults on a refractory high entropy alloy$

Alloy Design Workshop

The 2019 Alloy Design Workshop will focus on micro-mechanics informed alloy design: overcoming scale-transition challenges, and it will be held on Friday, December 6, 2019. The Alloy Design Workshop is an annual event held on the last day of the fall MRS Meeting, as an opportunity for the MIT community and the materials community as a whole to congregate in an intimate setting to present and discuss new, unpublished research.

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MADMEC 2019 winning teams

At this year's MADMEC competition, ecoTrio won the $10,000 grand prize, PETTIGREW came in second place, and RadioStar in third. ecoTrio's project was a sustainable alternative to non-degradable plastics, PETTIGREW's integrated live bacteria into plastic production to improve degradability, and RadioStar created a low-cost sensor for small-scale farmers.

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Prof. Cima receives Kingery Award

Professor Michael Cima will be presented with one of The American Ceramics Society's major awards, the W. David Kingery Award. This award is named after one of our former and world famous faculty members (now deceased), who is known for defining modern ceramics science; it recognizes distinguished lifelong achievements involving multidisciplinary and global contributions to ceramic technology, science, education and art.

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Study on correlation between sleep patterns and grades

Professor Jeffrey Grossman facilitated an experiment in which 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits in exchange for the researchers' access to a semester's worth of their activity data. The study started out as an attempt to find a correlation between physical exercise and academic performance, but researchers discovered there was a clear correlation between certain sleep habits and grades.

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Cody Friesen awarded Lemelson-MIT Prize

MIT alum Cody Friesen, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Arizona State University and founder of both Fluidic Energy and Zero Mass Water, was awarded the 2019 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for invention. Friesen joins a long lineage of inventors to receive the Lemelson-MIT Prize, the largest cash prize for invention in the United States for 25 years. While at MIT for graduate studies, his advisor was DMSE Professor Michael Cima.

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This week's events

Week of November 18: Monday: Special Seminar, Dr. Nicholae Barsan, 2:00, Chipman Room 6-104; SMSD Seminar, Prof. Nikolaos Bouklas, 4:00, 3-333. Wednesday: PPSM Seminar, Prof. Coray Colina.

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Spotlight

Ultrathin coating to protect 2-D materials from corrosion

Professors Ju Li and JJ Hu are a part of a team of researchers that has developed an ultrathin coating for use as a protective layer for important 2D materials. Many 2D materials have promising properties for optical, electronic, or other applications, but are held back by the ease with which they degrade when exposed to oxygen and water vapor. Now, these researchers have created a coating that is inexpensive and easily to apply and remove. This new coating, based on a family of compounds known as linear alkylamines, can be applied with a thinness of as little as 1 nanometer, is impervious to many liquids and solvents, blocks the penetration of oxygen, and generally extends the material's lifetime by 100. Their development could provide a way to overcome the "first hurdle" in attempting to work with promising 2D materials, opening up new areas of research.

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Magnified image of superconductor structure

Recent MIT faculty addition Prof. LeBeau receives PECASE

Professor Jim LeBeau joined our faculty on July 1. He was previously Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University where his research focus was on developing new TEM and scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) techniques to determine the atomic structures of materials, thereby understanding ceramics, metals, and electronic materials in a way that we never have before. Professor LeBeau has a B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic University and a Ph.D. from UCSB, both in materials science and engineering. He holds the John Chipman Career Development Chair. As part of the MIT.nano research community, Prof. LeBeau brings unique skills and experience in TEM and STEM techniques and instrumentation, which will enrich materials research at MIT immediately and for decades to come.

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