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UNC Material Science and Engineering Program Ranked 2nd in the Nation
March 11, 2007
UNC-Chapel Hill Press Release
CHAPEL HILL - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ranks second in the nation for its materials science & engineering program, as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education in its January 12, 2007 issue.
The organizing center for the materials science program at UNC is the newly established Institute for Advanced Materials, Nanoscience, & Technology (IAM), a cross-disciplinary collaboration between Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science faculty in the College of Arts & Sciences. The IAM has strategic partnerships in the Schools of Medicine, Pharmacy and Public Health which leverage internationally recognized strengths of UNC-Chapel Hill in polymer science and nanomaterials, thereby creating unique capabilities to drive the emerging new fields of nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine—areas critical to our well-being and our future economy.
Advanced materials are defined “…as materials that involve knowledge (and the creation of materials) at the molecular and/or atomic scale for the purpose of advancing technology and improving the human experience. Anything from Teflon on cookware to polymers in bioabsorbable stents constitutes an advanced material…” says Joseph M. DeSimone, William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and Founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Materials at UNC. DeSimone is a member of the Materials Section of the National Academy of Engineering and holds a joint appointment in Chemical Engineering at NC State University.
The materials science program at UNC was launched approximately twenty years ago by Thomas Meyer, then chair of the chemistry department, with strong encouragement from former provost Charles Morrow. “It was clear back then,” Meyer states, “that materials science was a significant scientific growth area for the future and would help fill in a significant gap in the teaching and research portfolio of the university.”
Consequently, in a tactical effort towards the implementation of an undergraduate Applied Sciences curriculum, “a combination of strategic senior hires and targeted junior hires” in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s “have allowed the discipline to grow enormously” says Richard Superfine, Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Physics & Astronomy and steering committee member of IAM. These hires began in 1988 with the recruitment of Edward T. Samulski, Cary Boshamer Professor of Chemistry, to start a program in polymer science within the chemistry department. Over the ensuing decade Samulski recruited DeSimone, Michael Rubinstein, J. Ross MacDonald Professor of Chemistry, Sergei Sheiko, and Valerie Sheares Ashby (’87), Bowman Gray Associate Professor of Chemistry. This environment encouraged Maurice Brookhart, W. R. Kenan Professor of Chemistry and member of the National Academy of Sciences, to apply his discoveries in catalysis to polymer synthesis thereby opening up new routes to commodity polymers for industrial manufacturers. In 2004, the IAM successfully recruited J. Michael Ramsey, Minnie Golby Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, to UNC, an international leader in the area of lab-on-a-chip technologies.
“Starting a materials science effort in the early 1990’s initially looked ‘too little too late’” says Samulski. “Nationally recognized programs had been in existence for a couple of decades. However, UNC’s program was one of the first to tackle research problems with tangible implications for society, which was actually beginning to be just as acceptable as ‘pure’ research.” According to Sean Washburn, Cary Boshamer Professor of Physics and Chair of Applied Materials & Sciences, IAM’s dedication to real-life applications is what gives the university its cutting edge in materials science.
These nascent efforts in Chemistry were soon complemented in Physics with key materials-oriented hires—Superfine, Washburn, Frank Tsui, Yue Wu and Otto Zhou, Lyle Jones Professor of Physics. Simultaneously in 1996 Carolina launched an Applied Mathematics Program led by M. Gregory Forest, Grant Dahlstrom Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering to build a capability in theory, modeling and simulation. Forest subsequently recruited an interdisciplinary faculty of 10 applied and computational mathematicians who collaborate with essentially every science unit on the UNC campus.
The members of the IAM steering committee all agree that the collaborative spirit across UNC is the true basis for the success of the materials science program, which most IAM faculty attribute to the subtle importance of the mere propinquity between the departments. There is already a powerful illustration of the unique strategic combination of materials science and medical/health sciences: In 2006 the National Cancer Institute awarded UNC a $25 million Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, one of only eight in the country.
“To be in the same company—only 20 years after the launching of our program—with the great materials science and engineering programs of our nation, including UC-Santa Barbara, MIT, University of Illinois, University of Minnesota and Princeton, is a real testimony to the vision and drive of our faculty,” says DeSimone.
The Number Two ranking was assigned to UNC’s materials science program by the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, developed by Academic Analytics, LLC, a company owned in part by the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. The Index judges graduate programs based on faculty publications and citations, as well as federal grant dollars, honors, and awards received up to 2005. UNC also ranks among the top ten Ph.D. programs in other scientific disciplines including nutrition, epidemiology, environmental science, and computer science, and leads the nation with its biomedical toxicology program.
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For more information, contact:
Joseph M. DeSimone
William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor
Director, Institute for
Advanced Materials, Nanoscience & Technology
desimone@unc.edu
919-962-2166
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