[Krishna Rajan] The Department of Materials Design and Innovation is a brand new and
transformative department that has focused on ways to use data science and
materials informatics to train and educate material scientists for both
research and education. The process to create this department involved finding
individuals who, not only, were talented in their own respective fields, but have
the ability to work across disciplines in new and exciting ways. Diversity is so
important to this department for both its intellectual breadth and the need
for having individuals who can address broad range of social problems that
where material science can have a great impact. An important objective of our
department is the ability to translate material science with fundamental
material science research and accelerate solutions that industry could use.
[Bruce Pittman] This department is unique
because of its marriage of data science methods with material science questions.
We're interested in how do you find new materials, how do you find materials that
can be substituted for materials that are difficult to obtain or maybe harmful
to the environment and we're using data science methods in order to explore
those questions and discover new answers. My research has been at the intersection
of quantitative methods and discipline specific questions and that's what
materials design and innovation is really all about, bringing data science methods
to bear on material science questions so it's a natural fit.
[Olga Wodo] My research is of the
nexus of computational physics, computer science and material science.
I'm currently designing heterogeneous microstructures for the next generation
salt oxide fuel cells, lithium ion batteries and organic solar cells. The
goal of my research group is to accelerate the way we design heterogeneous
microstructures. I hope my research will change the way we
design materials in future for the next-generation batteries but also for
solutions to sustain energy in our household and will lead to significant
changes for developing countries.
[Erik Einarsson] My research is growing two dimensional
materials, mainly graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides and growing
vertically stacked hetero structures of these materials and people usually study
these with Raman spectroscopy but we're trying to also use terahertz
spectroscopy because that corresponds in frequency and therefore in energy to the
very low frequency end of the Raman spectrum. So we would be looking at
similar energies and similar phenomena but using two different spectroscopic methods.
[Prathima Nalam] My research will generate a transformative understanding on the
structural mechanical properties of soft materials. We are questioning the
fundamental knowledge behind the soft material elasticity. This knowledge, we
believe, will enable us to develop soft reliable networks which will have a
tremendous impact on both biomedical as well as tribological societies.
These materials can be synthesized or they can be naturally occurring in
nature. Hydrogels, which are commonly found in eye contact lenses or examples
of synthetic networks, where as the cell and tissue networks are naturally
occurring materials. Being at the Department of Materials Design and
Innovation has already opened up several possibilities in my research. This not
only reduces the concept to development
timeline but I believe that this will also have a tremendous impact in
industry-academic relationships.
[Bruce] What we're trying to do is at the forefront
of bringing data science research methods into the education program so
that students naturally move from material science questions and using
data science methods in order to explore answers to those questions.
[Olga] MDI is unique in many ways. One way is the way we teach our students. For example, I am co-teaching
kinetics of materials where I provide students detailed technical background
and another person is providing them with detailed experimental background. I
think this is very unique aspect of the way we teach our students.
[Erik] I hope this department can help change the perspective a little bit about how data
is used in physical sciences rather than just digging through huge amounts of
data to use sparse amounts of data to guide the direction of research.
[Krishna] We have a broad range of students, skill sets and faculty doing exciting research at the
forefront in a broad range of innovative fields. We see this as the template for a
new approach of how we produce a next generation of material scientists that
can impact not just technical areas in material science but have a positive
impact on social well-being to the community.
[materials science word cloud in geometric shape]
[University at Buffalo, Department of Materials Design and Innovation]