The Materials/Mechanics graduate option in mechanical engineering allows students to focus their coursework on two fundamental areas of the discipline, materials science and mechanics, and how they interact with one another.
Materials science involves understanding what gives materials their properties -- and then using this knowledge to engineer new and better materials that can meet wide-ranging societal and environmental needs. Combining that knowledge with engineering mechanics enables students to solve technical problems in a wide range of fields including aerospace, automotive, biomedical, manufacturing, and computer engineering to name a few.
On the computational side, our Materials/Mechanics faculty possess a broad range of expertise in experimental, theoretical, and computational mechanics, from stress analysis to imaging techniques for stress/strain monitoring. On the physical side, faculty are involved in the design and testing of material properties, new biomedical materials, and composite structures. Materials scientists study how to fabricate new materials, predict their behavior, and control their structure and properties over length-scales spanning from meters down to the atomic scale.