Materials scientists

What is a material?

... All matter is potentially 'a material'. Whether we decide to call something a material depends on whether its structural, mechanical, electrical, magnetic or optical properties enable us to understand an existing role, or to suggest a new role, in some phenomenon or process. These are often called 'engineering' properties of materials, but the function they enable may be in biology or geology as well as traditional engineering.

I believe the idea that a material must, by definition, enable some 'engineering' function is what delineates materials science more than anything else. For instance, materials scientists are less concerned with the science that physicists have done on liquid helium and chemists are still doing on gases. Nonetheless, there are vast areas of overlap between chemistry, physics and materials science.

www.materials.ox.ac.uk



Materials Science is such a wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary subject that we could not possibly give a comprehensive overview.


• developing ceramic components to operate at 1,500C in the next generation of jet engines
• improving the biocompatibility of prosthetic implants by growing artificial bone and developing sophisticated surface coatings for these implants
• creating new semiconducting composite materials with individual layers a millionth of a centimetre thick that turn out to have some very unexpected properties
• modelling and measuring the way surfaces interact - including the atomic scale visualisation and control of friction processes
• at the forefront of the development of quantum computing
• designing the next generation of high performance packaging materials for everything from integrated circuits to food


outreach.materials.ox.ac.uk/MaterialsScience/MaterialsScienceatOxford/
matsciatoxford.php