The Center for Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) at MIT funds three different levels of research:

• Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs)
• Initiative Projects
• Seed Projects

Highlights of IRG research are reported on an on-going basis to the NSF MRSEC program.

Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs)

IRGs are composed of MIT faculty who, with their students and postdoctoral associates, investigate fundamental scientific questions and pathways to reach significant technological goals that can only be properly explored in a collaborative, multidisciplinary mode. These problems are too large in scope to be addressed by individual faculty members and their students. The research goals and accomplishments are reviewed regularly so that appropriate adjustments can be made to insure the quality of the Center's research effort.  

• IRG-I: Design of Nanomaterials for Electrochemical Energy Storage and Conversion
• IRG-II: Mechanomutable Heteronanomaterials
• IRG-III: Multimaterial Multifunctional Nano-Structured Fibers 

Initiative Projects

The purpose of Initiative funding is to incubate and develop a nascent interdisciplinary group that has the potential to become a future IRG. Typically, an initiative comprises three or four faculty members sharing a common vision for a newly emerging area of research.

• Initiative-I: Engineering Living Cells via Nanomaterials
• Initiative-II: New States of Frustrated and Correlated Materials

Seed Projects

The primary goal of seed funding is to support research that has the potential to redefine the direction of an existing IRG or to lead to the creation of a completely new IRG. The fresh direction may be motivated by a newly appreciated opportunity for scientific discovery or by a specific issue of technological relevance. Strong preference is given to junior and new faculty members to draw them into collaborative interdisciplinary research.

• Seed-I: Nanoparticle Control and Transport using Mobile Magnetic Domain Wall Traps
  PI: Geoffrey Beach, Assistant Professor, Department of Materials Science & Engineering
• Seed-II: Ultrafast Dynamics of Low Energy Excitations in Frustrated Materials
  PI: Nuh Gedik, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics
• Seed-III: Tailoring Optical Properties of Semiconductor Nanomaterials
  PI: Silvija Grade?ak, Assistant Professor, Department of Materials Science and Engineering
• Seed-IV: Suspended Graphene Devices for Quantum Electronics and Nanosensing
  PI: Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, Assistant Professor, Department of Physics

• Seed-V: Large Area, Few-layer Graphene Films for Various Applications
  PI: Jing Kong, Assistant Professor, Department of EECS