Welcome to the wonderful world of materials! No scientific or engineering advancement can be made without advances in materials science and engineering. The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer is uniquely positioned to provide the highest level of education and research at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We equip our students with strong fundamentals, embed them into state of the art research and professional development opportunities to enable fulfilling careers in academia, industry and government. The interests of the Department span the classical sub-divisions of materials including metallurgy, ceramics and glasses, polymers, composite materials, and electronic materials. The faculty research foci span a wide range of modeling processes, including ab-initio electronic structure based methods and dynamical molecular simulation, as well as advanced materials synthesis and characterization studies and investigation of traditional engineering metrics of mechanical and environmental performance of structural materials.
The department is the home of approximately 120 undergraduate and 60 graduate students. It is equipped with the latest state-of-the-art technician-supported analytical and characterization instrumentation. Additionally, Rensselaer houses the Center for Computational Innovation, the home of the legendary IBM Blue Gene Q, one of the world’s largest computational platform, a completely equipped Class A clean room for processing electronic materials, and centralized materials processing facilities. The Department prides itself on its undergraduate research program that attempts to place virtually every undergraduate in an active graduate level laboratory experience.
Graduates of the Department, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels populate the entire science and engineering worlds including academe, industry, business, and government. Upon graduation they are fully equipped to follow Rensselaer’s motto “Why not change the World?”
Pawel Keblinski
Professor and Department Head
Materials Science and Engineering