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Materials Discovery & Development

Duke engineers are leaders in discovering and developing materials with desired structures and properties for diverse applications in areas such as health, computing, energy and security.

Aaron Franklin and lab member show tire sensor invention

Major Centers & Initiatives

University-Wide

  •  Duke Materials Initiative (DMI)

  •  Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMiF)

Biomaterials

Computational Materials Science

Energy, Electronic & Photonic Materials

Metamaterials

Soft Matter & Nanoscale Materials

Highlights

Duke Materials Initiative logo

Duke Materials Initiative

This cross-campus initiative drives materials development in areas such as soft matter, biomaterials, computational materials science, metamaterials, electronic, photonic and quantum materials and energy and sustainable materials

Graph of most common nanocomposites in NanoMine database

Writing New Recipes for High-Performance Materials

Duke materials scientists and engineers deploy AI and other digital tools to accelerate development of new materials to harvest energy, heal the body and more

researcher in SMIF lab

Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility

Our NSF-sponsored SMIF offers state-of-the-art characterization, imaging and cleanroom fabrication capabilities to advance materials, devices, and integrated systems research across Duke and beyond