Jump to Footer

Materials Science and Engineering: Translating fundamental discoveries at the nanoscale into materials that benefit society.

The vast majority of the materials people encounter every day have been engineered to have specific properties that make the materials useful or valuable. As materials scientists and engineers, our goal is to understand how the arrangement of the materials' structures on a very fine scale translates into materials with properties that can benefit society. Our department continually strives to expand its core strengths and to work across disciplines to address complex challenges, from more efficient jet engines to new electronic materials that extend the limits of Moore's law. With recent faculty hires, we have reinforced our expertise in corrosion, high-temperature materials, surfaces and interface science, electronic materials, and computational materials science. And we are firmly established in such emerging fields as two-dimensional materials, soft and/or biological materials, and functional thermal material systems.

Latest News

Our Faculty

Thumbnail of Nikhil Shukla
Phone: 434-924-6587

Nikhil Shukla

Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Research Areas
  • Emerging solid-state devices for Boolean and non-Boolean computing
  • Device and circuit solutions for large-scale data storage
  • Integration of novel materials and conventional devices for functional diversification
Read More
Thumbnail of Bi-Cheng Zhou
Phone: (434) 243-2883

Bi-Cheng Zhou

Assistant Professor

Research Areas
  • Computational thermodynamics and kinetics (the CALPHAD method)
  • Ab initio modeling of thermodynamics and diffusion based on density functional theory
  • Physical metallurgy, theoretical modeling of phase transformations in alloys
Read More

More About Our Department

Research Highlights

More About Us

  • 108

    Graduate students

  • 23

    Faculty members

  • $ 11 M

    In sponsored research for FY 2021