Research

Research Areas

Nanomaterials

The study of material in which the common descriptive unit of size is 1-100 nm. Materials with nanometer-scale features tend to have unique mechanical, catalytic, and electro-optical properties. A wide variety of aspects under this topic are of interest to the researchers in the center. Applications vary from nano-enabled membranes for water treatment to nanostructured devices for novel electronic devices.

Soft-materials and Bio-materials

This area includes any bulk material, construct, or surface that interacts with or is composed of a biological system. While this field is young, it has seen explosive growth and includes overlap with medicine, tissue engineering, biology, and chemistry. Biomaterials are used today for drug delivery, surgery, and dental applications.

Photonic and Electromagnetic Materials

An archetypical example of these category would be semiconductors which underpin all of our modern computerized and light absorbing/emitting devices. This field has strong overlap with physics and electrical engineering and includes topics such as superconductors, spintronics, metamaterials, and topological insulators. There is further crossover into the area of advanced fluorescent materials for labeling and sensing, in particular, in biomedical applications.

Computational Materials Science

With the vast improvements in computing power over the last several decades, simulating complex materials systems has become possible. This allows for the modeling of materials at all length scales using methods such as kinetic Monte Carlo, density functional theory, and molecular dynamics.