Materials Day 2025 explores challenges and breakthroughs in extreme materials

The rapid advancement of materials capable of withstanding extreme environments—and the ability to manufacture them at high volume—are priorities for the United States government as well as for industry worldwide. These themes were underscored by keynote speakers from the Department of Defense (DOD) and LG Innotek at Materials Day 2025, Designing the Future of Extreme Materials.

Matthew Draper of the DOD and  S. David Roh of LG Innotek went on to describe the challenges involved in advancing new materials and how their respective organizations are addressing them. 

The DOD, for example, is building a network of programs to accelerate materials discovery. By mid-2027, researchers using this network “will be able to go from walking in with a concept to having metal samples and certification data in less than three months,” said Draper, technical director of metallurgy and manufacturing for the Innovation Capability and Modernization (ICAM) Office through the DOD. That process currently takes years. 

Materials Day 2025, held by the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) on October 14, also included talks by eight MIT professors working on everything from high-temperature materials for aerospace applications to polymers for bioelectronics. 

In his introductory remarks, C. Cem Tasan, director of the MRL and a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), noted that “materials research is distributed across all of MIT. The MRL is working to organize and push forward that research. Materials Day 2025 is a good example of that.”

Morning speakers from MIT were DMSE Professor Elsa Olivetti, “Screening for Alternative Cement Materials”; Associate Professor Zachary Cordero, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “Design and Manufacture of High-Temperature Materials for Emerging Aerospace Applications”; Assistant Professor Ericmoore Jossou, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), “Extended Lattice Defects Evolution in Coupled Extreme Environments”; and Associate Professor Josephine Carstensen, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, “Designing Manufacturable Architectures with Topology Optimization.”

Afternoon MIT speakers were NSE Professor Bilge Yildiz, “Computing with Protons, and How to Find Better Proton Conductors”; DMSE Professor Juejun Hu, “From Giant Optical Changes to Extreme Endurance: Phase Change Materials for Photonics”; DMSE Assistant Professor Aristide Gumyusenge, “Polymer Materials for Bioelectronics”; and Professor Nuh Gedik, Department of Physics, “Capturing Light Induced Phase Transitions with Femtosecond Movies.”

Upcoming issues of the MRL newsletter will spotlight the research presented by MIT speakers.

In addition, 16 MIT students participated in a poster competition on specific projects related to advanced materials. All were nominated for the honor by their respective advisors. The winner was Matthew Ye for a poster titled “Kinetic Engineering in Colloidal Assembly: Synthetic Tools for Complex Architectures.” Ye is a DMSE graduate student. 

DOD investing billions

To combat growing geopolitical tensions, the DOD is investing billions in growing and modernizing the defense industrial base. Draper showed an excerpt from a reconciliation bill passed last year listing appropriations that involve materials. He encouraged his audience to read such documents. “This is the strongest signal you are ever going to get about what the US government cares about and where you should be thinking in the future if you are looking for [government funding],” he said.

Drilling down, Draper noted the appropriation of a billion dollars for the expansion and acceleration of qualification activities. “This is the government telling you that they are tired of the speed at which our community is transitioning materials advancements,” he said.

“This is about fixing the entire paradigm” for getting new materials into the marketplace, Draper continued. “It cannot take the length of a PhD anymore to generate [a new material], and it cannot take the length of another PhD after that” to certify that material for industrial use. That is the inspiration for the network of programs the government is building to drastically accelerate materials discovery.

Industry perspective

S. David Roh is chief technology officer and senior vice president of LG Innotek, one of the largest companies in the multibillion-dollar Korean LG conglomerate. In his keynote address, Roh noted that from an industrial perspective, an extreme material is not just one that can perform under extreme conditions. It is also one that can be manufactured at extremely large scale, and that can be quickly developed, from initial concept to sample.

To put this in context, Roh said that LG Innotek makes over 500 million camera and 3D sensing modules for smartphones every year. The company also produces substrates that connect semiconductor chips to the motherboard, the main circuit board in a computer. Some nine billion of these are produced annually, which is equivalent to 65 football fields made of substrate. “That is the scale on which we operate,” Roh said.

At the same time, LG Innotech must keep innovating. Roh noted that smartphones are becoming much thinner. “So how do you make something thinner and still put a high-performance camera inside? We are forced to look at materials.” 

Echoing Draper, Roh noted that the development of these materials and technologies “cannot take five years…we’re talking about three to six months of iteration time for everything you need to innovate.”

Roh went on to give case studies of LG Innotek research aimed at addressing the challenges associated with the constant innovation required by the global marketplace and consumer expectations. 

Both Roh and Draper emphasized the importance of new materials in their respective domains. Draper brought that home by noting that his office alone invests a billion dollars every year to support anything that impacts the US defense industrial base, “which, in the realm of extreme materials, is going to be just about everything.”