Selective Investment 1998 Award Recipients

In 1988 one of the world's oldest and most prestigious departments of Metallurgical Engineering and Ceramic Engineering merged to form the present Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE). In 1997, U. S. News and World Report ranked the department 15th in the nation. Last fall the department's faculty developed a strategic plan to place the department among the top ten MSE departments in the country and submitted the plan to the University's Selective Investment competition. Receiving a Selective Investment award will permit the department to expand its faculty by about one-third to equal the size of most of the top-ranked departments.

MSE has strong interdisciplinary components involving the departments of Chemistry, Physics, Biology, as well as the College of Medicine and Public Health. And, about 75 percent of all engineers deal with materials. For example, MSE faculty conduct research on semiconductor materials in collaboration with faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering. All these efforts will broaden and strengthen the University's materials horizon, and a world-class MSE program will have a strong impact on the University as a whole.

Ongoing research in the department includes the development of super-strength alloys; high temperature superconductors; environmentally safe anti-corrosion treatments for airplanes; sensors for aggressive environments; industrial waste conversion into non-hazardous glass; methods and materials for the manufacture of tomorrow's transportation systems; improvements in forming technology; surface and interface science; development of improved materials for biological implants; and methods to characterize materials from the atomic scale all the way to electrical generators as big as football fields.

The department will use its Selective Investment funds to recruit world leaders to guide a broadly balanced materials program with a major new thrust in computational materials design.

The first such leader to enter the department under the Selective Investment plan is Dr. James C. Williams, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, who has been appointed to the Honda Chair for Transportation. In addition, our generous alumni and friends have just completed the $1.5 million endowment of The Orton Chair in Ceramics. The Selective Investment funds will be used for the salary component of this chair so that all of the endowed funds can be used to sponsor research.

Ohio's industries are looking to computer modeling, rather than expensive experimentation, to develop the materials of tomorrow. Modeling is a key element in bringing development costs down and permitting private industries to develop new materials without government subsidies. In addition to using the Selective Investment funds to build this computational thrust, the department is leading an international effort, guided by our Ohio Eminent Scholar Hamish Fraser, to build an $80 million Science and Technology Center focused in this area. Numerous companies, such as Boeing, Brush Wellman, General Electric, Howmet, Lockheed Martin, Rolls Royce, Symyx, and Pratt & Whitney have already joined this team. In addition, the team includes researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Cambridge University, Clark Atlanta University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin, as well as from NIST, Sandia, and Wright Patterson Air Force Base.