Engineering Materials and Design
Engineering materials and design have undergone a profound transformation over the last decades, shifting from the early efforts that relied on single‐phase materials optimized primarily through geometric refinement to today’s frontier that lies in multiphase, architected systems that coalesce structure and composition across scales to achieve multifunctionality, adaptability, and intelligence. This shift has been propelled by breakthroughs in novel material chemistries, additive and hybrid manufacturing technologies, bioinspired and biomimetic strategies, and data‐driven methodologies, and importantly is motivated by global challenges— carbon-neutral energy systems, antimicrobial biointerface for healthcare devices and precision medicine, and extreme environment composites for aerospace frontiers. Central to this paradigm shift is engineering material – structure systems whose emergent functionalities are largely beyond the individual components or their simple sum, and rely critically on precisely orchestrated structural interactions, redefining the engineered design strategies.
Core Faculty
Sean R. Agnew
Our research is focused primarily on metals analysis, including magnesium alloy formability, intermetallic behaviors, and aluminum alloy fatigue.
Prasanna Balachandran
My interests are in materials informatics, density functional theory, machine learning, bayesian inference, and optimal design methods applied to accelerate the search and discovery of novel 2D materials, metallic alloys, ferroic and electronic materials.
Tomonari Furukawa
Gavin Garner
Gavin Garner joined the University of Virginia faculty in 2009. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Colby College and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia in both Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Christopher Goyne
Professor Goyne, after groundbreaking research at his alma mater University of Queensland, Australia, and UVA Engineering, continues his work in hypersonic air-breathing propulsion, supersonic aerodynamics, hypersonic ground and flight test techniques, diagnostic and measurement technique development, controls and advanced manufacturing.
David L. Green
Our group focuses on the synthesis of well-defined nanoparticles, their dispersion into polymer solutions and melts, and their suspension rheology. With our fundamental studies, we seek to optimize processing to achieve a desirable microstructure in industrial suspensions, and to set a foundation for developing constitutive rheological models.
Patrick E. Hopkins
Patrick E. Hopkins is a Whitney Stone Professor in Engineering at the University of Virginia, with a primary appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and courtesy appointments in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Physics. He is also the director of the ExSiTE Lab.
Xiaodong (Chris) Li
Michael Momot
Elizabeth J. Opila
Our research focuses on materials for use in extreme environments and can be applied to materials for use in aircraft engines, rocket engines, energy conversion technologies, and thermal protection systems.
Hilary Bart-Smith
Professor Bart-Smith joined the University of Virginia faculty in the fall of 2002. Dr. Bart-Smith came to UVA from Princeton University where she worked at the Princeton Materials Institute with A.G. Evans. Bart-Smith has founded the Multifunctional Materials and Structures Laboratory and the Bio-inspired Engineering Research Laboratory.
Ye (Sarah) Sun
Sun joined UVA as an associate professor in 2021. Prior to her position at UVA, Sun was an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University.
Tengteng (Toni) Tang
Dr. Tang's research program centers on the structure-mechanics relationships of hierarchical biological materials and their clinical and biomedical applications. Many biological tissues, such as our own skeleton, perform a diverse range of functions with remarkable mechanical properties. These exceptional properties arise from the functional
Haydn N. Wadley
Haydn N.G. Wadley is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at UVA. He has interests in materials science, composite materials, micromechanics, and thermal transport. His current research explores high temperature thermal coatings systems, microarchitectured materials, entropy stabilized refractory metal alloys and rare earth silicates.
Jennifer L. West
B.S. Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992; Ph.D. Biomedical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1996
Baoxing Xu
Dr. Xu joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The University of Virginia in the fall of 2014. He received his PhD in Mechanics and Materials from Columbia University in 2012 and was a Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2012 to 2014.