Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science Research
Amorphous Materials: Typically, metallic melts crystallize when cooled from above their melting temperature. Some combinations of metals, however, exhibit a low desire and ability to crystallize, hence they don’t crystallize but freeze into a glass during solidification…
Soft Matter and Complex Fluids: Systems whose physical and mechanical properties are comparable to thermal energy at room temperature and thus easily deformed by thermal forces are considered soft materials…
Physical and Engineering Biology: Faculty from the School of Engineering & Applied Science and the Departments of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemisty…
Robotics, Mechatronics, and Human Machine Interface: We conduct research in areas that synthesize the fields of robotics, machine design, human factors, and dynamic control. Our human-machine interaction laboratories explore the physical human…
Combustion: More than 80% of the world’s energy consumption involves some form of combustion. From a global warming perspective, combustion remains the most challenging technology until carbon capture and sequestration become feasible.…
Physics of Novel Materials: Research on the fundamental physics and device aspects of novel materials is conducted by several Applied Physics faculty in collaboration with faculty…
Interfacial Phenomena: The boundary between two phases, the interface between the phases, has very different properties from that of the bulk phase and are important in a variety of chemical engineering processes…
Nanomaterials: Nanomaterials represent a new class of materials, where ever-smaller length scales (<100 nm) impart altered or enhanced properties…
Fluid Mechanics: The dynamics of moving fluids has a tremendous impact on our everyday lives. Turbulent flow in the atmosphere and oceans, for example, plays a fundamental role in Earth's climate systems; industrial mixing processes harness the chaotic nature of fluid flow; and biological systems have evolved to exploit…
Interdisciplinary Research Priorities
