MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)

Discover materials science innovation on Monday at the MADMEC finals, where teams compete to develop technologies for a more sustainable future. Projects include microwave-hardened ceramics, biodegradable medical electrodes, and spray-on ice prevention. Ice cream to follow in 6-104. November 10 | 1 to 2 pm | 6-120

Upcoming lecture will be given by Mustafa Unal of Argonne National Laboratory’s Materials Science division, and will discuss new approaches that extend the operational lifetimes of gamma-ray detectors and highlight how balancing volume, resolution, and stability can enable their use in security, medical, and space applications. Come to the Chipman Room, 6-104, at 3:30 pm on Monday, November 10.

Lithium-ion batteries are ubiquitous, but scientists still don’t fully understand how lithium ions move into the battery’s electrodes during charging and discharging. Professor Yang Shao-Horn and other researchers use experiments and advanced modeling to test the coupled ion–electron transfer theory, in which an electron is transferred to the battery electrode along with a lithium ion. Read more in Science: https://buff.ly/Pk8jxEN

DMSE alum Kathleen Alexander is the co-founder and CEO of Savor, a food startup that makes cooking fats like butter and palm oil from carbon, without any animals or plants. The company aims to alleviate the agriculture industry’s strain on the environment.

“Our technology has the potential to introduce a new avenue for minimally invasive bioelectric devices that can operate wirelessly deep within the human body,” says MIT Associate Professor Deblina Sarkar. DMSE Instructor David C. Bono joined Sarkar and other MIT researchers on the work.

At Materials Day 2025 on October 14, Professor C. Cem Tasan, director of MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory, noted that “materials research is distributed across all of MIT. The MRL is working to organize and push forward that research. Materials Day 2025 is a good example of that.”

Using a newly developed theory explaining how amino acids stabilize proteins, Professor Alfredo Alexander-Katz and an international team aim to stabilize protein-based drugs and improve their effectiveness. “There could be really interesting applications of what we learn here for multiple diseases,” says Alexander-Katz.

“It is mandatory to reshape our conception of fertilizers and try to rely, at least in part, on alternative products that are safer, cheaper, and more sustainable,” says MIT postdoc and Kavanaugh fellow Giorgio Rizzo. “This prestigious fellowship will help me build a concrete product for a company, adding more value to our research.”

“If you look at AI in particular — to train these really large models — that consumes a lot of energy. And if you compare that to the amount of energy that we consume as humans when we’re learning things, the brain consumes a lot less energy,” says DMSE PhD student Miranda Schwacke. “That’s what led to this idea to find more brain-inspired, energy-efficient ways of doing AI.”

A renewed section on the website spotlights DMSE’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem, where materials research drives real-world innovation. https://buff.ly/qdcVnXI