Chris Schuh: The Department of Materials Science and Engineering
is responsible for the
curation of the discipline of
materials science and engineering as we teach it
to our students here at MIT.
Our entire curriculum is built on hands-on
discovery and invention and, in the future,
what that means is that
increasingly we would like to take any
element of the educational process that
is not hands-on and we would like to
package it and make it completely flexible.
In our department, Ii think we
all believe that the future of education
will be more efficient than one to many
delivery of content. So the lecture
model where one person delivers to
hundreds of people — that kind of content
can increasingly be made
compartmentalized in online modules
where students can not only sit one time
through a lecture delivered at them, but
they can watch it over and over again.
It can be hyperlinked to appropriate text
materials and reference materials and it
can be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Lorna Gibson: So for instance I teach a
course on the mechanical behavior of
materials and I've been teaching that
for many years here at MIT. I've also
developed it as an online course through
MITx and edX. So to do that, we videotaped
the lectures, I developed screencasts of
examples, a little like the Khan Academy.
I worked out examples on a tablet
so students could see that. We have online
problem sets now, and all of these things
that I developed for the online outside
education, for people outside of MIT, is
also available for the MIT students.
The online students outside of MIT have been
very enthusiastic and they've been very
appreciative of what MIT has done here.
I think people are a little stunned and
amazed that MIT is making all this
material available and that the quality
of what's offered is so good.
I've been impressed with how many different
countries the students have been from
who are taking the online courses.
My mechanical
behavior of materials class, which was
taught last fall, had students from over
140 countries taking it
and I thought that was really remarkable.
Chris Schuh: One of the things that we love in
materials science and engineering is that
when you've gone to the trouble of
designing and constructing a new
material, new materials can be used in
lots of different ways, and so it's
pretty common that we might be designing
a material for one application and we
find that it's a platform technology and
it can be applied broadly across a whole range of industries.
Polina Anikeeva: Our lab is
interested in manipulating and recording
neural activity in both the brain and
the spinal cord and also peripheral
nerves. In order to do something like
that, you need a device that is flexible
so it can address the mechanics and
materials properties of the neural
tissue. We decided to leverage
multi-material fiber technology which
was largely pioneered by Professor Yoel Fink,
also in our department,
except that we decided that we needed to
use really soft materials that are most
of them are polymers and polymer
composites. And then we can introduce all
of these materials into a structure
which is a template of the device and we
can now implant it into the brain or the
spinal cord or peripheral nerves and
interact with that complex system
minimally invasively. We're extremely
excited what we were able to do is this
technology with this type of materials
processing because before we came into
the field of neural engineering, there
was really no way of creating those
complex multi functional structures and
what multi-material fiber technology
allowed us to do is to incorporate all
of those different modalities into a
structure that is still very sleek and
very biocompatible.
Yet-Ming Chiang: Energy research in general offers tremendous opportunities
for materials scientists and engineers
such as myself. Right now, one of the
things that really fascinates me is
whether or not we can get the cost of
energy storage down so low that we can
have a technology that enables not just
the hourly shifting of
something such as solar energy, not even
daily, weekly, but actually seasonal
shifting, so that for instance in the
northern hemisphere, where we have so
much more sunlight in the summer than in
the winter, it would be possible to store
energy seasonally,
store it in the summer and actually use it again
in the winter. That will require new
battery technology of extraordinarily
low cost and high performance.
Gene Fitzgerald: SMART is MIT's research lab in Singapore. It is
designed to be a new experiment in
international collaboration in areas of
research that interest both Singapore
researchers and MIT researchers. So an
example of what we're doing —
here is a 200 millimeter silicon CMOS
wafer but it's actually quite unique in
that we have the ability to peel off
state-of-the-art silicon circuits
supplied by a real manufacturing
environment and put them onto engineered
substrates, allowing us to integrate new
kinds of materials and devices into
integrated circuits for the first time.
That's the kind of thing that our
collaboration and Singapore allows us to do.
Lionel Kimerling: A new consortium which is a mega
consortium which is called AIM Photonics
is part of a set of manufacturing
innovation initiatives that the Obama
administration has installed and
AIM Photonics is the fourth commissioned one,
and now there are seven that exist and
the role of AIM Photonics is to combine
manufacturing facilities where industry
can participate in design developing
processes and developing new concepts
and produce those prototypes in a
foundry type operation.
Chris Schuh: It's an exciting time for materials science at MIT.
The faculty has grown by
a third in the past five years and we
right now are watching the construction
of a new materials-centric building right
at the heart of campus. In the end if we
get more students in the lab working on
hands-on discovery and invention,
the world can be a much better place.