New Materials Science and Engineering, Nanotechnology

Materials Science and Engineering is to be the groundwork for technological age and platform for future progress.

MIT: The field of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) researches all classes of materials (metals, ceramics, electronic materials, and biomaterials) from a unified viewpoint and with an emphasis on the connections between the underlying structure and the processing, properties, and performance of the material.

MSE grew out of the disciplines of metallurgy and ceramics and now includes polymers, semiconductors, magnetic materials, photonic materials, and biological materials. A materials scientist studies how materials react in different conditions (such as temperature and pressure) and understands that all materials can be approached from a common set of principles. Architects, civil engineers, toy companies, NASA, bio-medical research companies, and the data storage industry are all recent users of technologies that developed from research in MSE.

Most fields in science and engineering are concerned in some way with materials, but only the field of materials science and engineering focuses directly on them.

What is Biomaterials?

UC-Berkeley & UC-SF: Biomaterials can be classified as synthetic or natural materials intended to either augment, direct, replace, repair or regenerate organs, tissues, or cells. The field of biomaterials employs the combination of concepts and experimental techniques used in materials science and engineering, as well as the biological sciences, to address the structure-property-performance relationships of biomaterials and the devices that employ them. Biomaterials origins stem from the use of synthetic materials (metals, polymer & ceramics) in diverse applications as vascular graphs, artificial hips and dental restorations. More recently the scope of the field has broadened to include studies of natural tissues, cellular structures, and biomacromolecules, sometimes collectively referred to as biological materials. The biomaterials field has rapidly expanded to incorporate additional interdisciplinary elements of the biomedical and physical sciences. Biointerfaces, bio-microdevices, controlled drug delivery, tissue engineering, and efforts to apply knowledge from cell and molecular biology to regenerate tissues and organs are now at the leading edge of biomaterials research.