Exploring Engineering Ep. 08: Materials Science and Engineering

Mary Scott
You know, every company that makes a product needs material scientists. And I think, you know, maybe one of the misconceptions—and I think it stems maybe from material science not being on folks’ radar—is just how varied the jobs that you can get are.

Laura Vogt
Thank you to Mary Scott, faculty member in Materials Science and Engineering, for our first glimpse into material science. We’ll hear more from Mary later in our episode.

Hi, I’m Laura Vogt. I’m the host and producer of this podcast, Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley. I am part of Berkeley Engineering’s Marketing and Communications team as the Director of Student Communications. Our episode today is all about Materials Science and Engineering, or MSE, as we often refer to it.

I know when I first started working with the College of Engineering, MSE was the major that I knew the least about. I have learned so much during my time here. However, I wish I had these conversations that I’m sharing with you today much earlier.
I’m excited that we have three guests sharing with you what the study of Materials Science and Engineering is, how it’s changing the world that you live in, and places you can start exploring it more.

Our first conversation today is with current student Ava Daniels, and we get to learn about how she was able to pick MSE as her major.

Ava Daniels
My name is Ava Daniels. I’m majoring in Materials Science and Engineering.

As a junior, I knew I wanted to do engineering. I was always interested in, like, science and, like, building things, but I was really, like, stuck with, like, picking a major, right? I approached, like, my senior year of high school, and everyone seemed like they knew what they wanted to do. And I was just like, how do you guys know all these things?

Or they’re, like, just majoring in what their parents, like, majored in. So I picked, like, materials engineering because I did a little summer camp one day at, like, Drexel University, and they’re really big for, like, MSE. So that really sparked my interest.
And then I kind of remembered that as I was applying to college because I wanted to do something more multidisciplinary. So now that I’m here, I know I’ve made the right decision. Because, you know, with MSE, you can go into basically any other engineering field. Engineers are usually qualified to do that.

But, like, I know people who are, like, pre-med—they’re going to the biotech, biology side of things. Or, like, you can also do, like, electronic materials, semiconductors, metals. There’s people going into, like, aerospace stuff. You can go into, like, metallurgy. There’s just such a huge variety.

And the fact that we, like, share the same major is, like, pretty crazy sometimes. I think the MSE department here, like, I guess, like, confirmed my belief that it would be a good idea to major in MSE.

Laura Vogt
You know, it’s always so much fun to meet with the alums and hear about what they’re doing after their undergraduate studies. I’m happy to introduce you to Calton Kong, an MSE alum who’s studying for his Ph.D. here at Berkeley. He shares his journey and what he’s excited about in material science.

Calton Kong
I’m Calton Kong, and I was doing a bachelor’s here in Materials Science and Engineering, and now I’m a Ph.D. student in Materials Science and Engineering at Berkeley as well.

So when I was 12 or 11, I watched these PBS documentaries called Nova, and I remember there were a bunch of episodes from physicists. 12-year-old me was very into it. And I said, you know, I wanted to be a particle physicist at CERN, and I wanted to, you know, solve nuclear fusion so that we can have infinite energy and we don’t have to worry about climate change and all that kind of stuff.

And then when I was in high school, it’s like, okay, if I really want to help with a science problem or some sort of solution towards climate change and having a more sustainable energy future, it would probably come somewhere in storage, solar, wind, and all those kinds of generation and storage capabilities.

I had a friend in high school who was two years older than me, and we just happened to be in the same physics class. I asked him, like, what are you doing after high school? He goes, “I’m studying material science in college.” And I said, “What is material science?” And he told me, “Well, it’s a study of anything solid,” and it’s a really interesting disciplinary field. So he wants to go in to study battery technologies.

I thought that was really nice—like, there’s a field that encompasses all the sustainable generation technology, because it includes solar panels, batteries, windmill materials. And now, as I know doing my research, also electrocatalytic materials and other kinds of electrochemistry.

Electrochemistry spans both material science, chemical engineering, chemistry, and all other kinds of fields. So that was how I ended up picking material science, because I didn’t know what it was until he told me.

I wanted to do electrochemistry. So I knew it needed to have some aspect of that. So when I went in, I really thought, you know, I want to do batteries—lithium-ion batteries, or other kinds of batteries, long-duration storage solutions like flow batteries.

On virtual Cal Day back in 2020, I heard my current advisor, Joel Ager, give a little intro talk about what he does, and he talked about electrocatalysis—turning CO₂ using electrochemistry into useful chemicals and fuel goals. And at first, I thought, like, oh, that’s an interesting problem. I decided my first year that I would cold email Joel and work on electrocatalysis.

Laura Vogt
If students wanted to learn more about MSE, what would you suggest they do to learn more about it?

Calton Kong
I’d just talk with people. Find an MSE or someone who has studied materials or works in materials to talk with.

The YouTube channel Veritasium and NileRed—he recently has just taken on material science projects. He’s typically a synthetic chemist, just showing, like, him making weird chemicals in his own warehouse in Canada. He makes really nice videos now about him essentially replicating many scientific materials papers out there.

I remember two years ago, he made videos on transparent wood and bulletproof wood. That’s probably a good place to start.

Laura Vogt
Our final conversation on this episode is with Mary Scott, who you had a short introduction to earlier. She was interviewed by Sarah Yang, the Assistant Dean of Marketing and Communications in the College of Engineering.

Mary Scott
My name is Mary Scott. I am a faculty member in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at UC Berkeley. In our department, I am also the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, and I also have an appointment as a Faculty Staff Scientist at the National Center for Electron Microscopy, which is a facility inside the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Sarah Yang
How would you describe the study of Materials Science and Engineering to those of us who really don’t know much about it?

Mary Scott
Broadly speaking, I would describe Materials Science and Engineering—so the name is a clue. It’s both a discipline that is interested in the fundamental science that governs the relationship between material structures, properties, and their processing history. So there’s a lot of fundamental science in this degree and also engineering.

Ultimately, we want to design materials for specific applications—to make them more energy efficient, to make them perform under more extreme environments, et cetera, or to make them more cheaply. Broadly speaking, that’s what Materials Science is about.

My route to material science was really through my research. So I have a variety of educational backgrounds on the engineering and fundamental science side. I have degrees in aerospace engineering and physics.
Sarah Yang
When you were in school—middle school, high school—were you thinking at all about what area you would go into?

Mary Scott
Definitely, I was thinking about it. And I think one thing that I wish was true was that more people in middle school and high school knew about Materials Science and Engineering.

I personally did not know about it when I was in high school, so it wasn’t on my radar. I actually went to college as an engineering student undeclared, and I really didn’t even consider Materials Science and Engineering because I didn’t know about it. And we do find that a lot of high school students know less about MSE.

I think that I wish I had known, because I think it was something that really would have piqued my interest when I was growing up. I come from a very rural area, and basically, we didn’t have a lot—really any—tech industry in the area that I grew up in.
I was thinking about careers that I saw in my friends’ parents and my own family. I kind of knew that being an engineer was a job, and I knew that people who were engineers liked math and liked science classes in high school, just like I did. So I sort of broadly set my sights on being an engineer in college and ultimately found my way to working in MSE and working with material scientists through my research.

Because I found that I really loved the career as a researcher—that was ultimately what really lit the fire that excited me to go get my Ph.D.

You know, maybe one of the misconceptions—and I think it stems maybe from material science not being on folks’ radar—is just, first of all, how varied the jobs that you can get are. There are people who emphasize biomaterials, soft materials, electronic materials, who might go work for Intel and, you know, optimize transistors or screen displays; people who work closely with structural engineers who are metallurgists.

So there’s a real breadth of career possibilities, and that also translates to a lot of job opportunities. Especially as we’re concerning ourselves more with energy materials, making longer-lasting batteries, worrying about energy storage problems—all of these have material science problems that really are the key to advancing these technologies.

In a lot of ways, it’s a very cutting-edge field. I think that a lot of the science that folks that leave our department go on to do is quite exciting and really relevant to societal problems that are important to solve.

I would really recommend that folks look into it—especially if you’re someone who is interested in a topic like applied physics, or someone who really likes to understand fundamental science and the origin of why things are the way that they are, but also has this urge to be very hands-on and wanting to make an impact—either by making a new device or advancing a technology.
So much of what made me excited about being a scientist was really dissecting how things work. I was always fascinated with this idea of, like, if I was stranded on a desert island, how could I make this thing? Like, could I make a battery? Could I make a solar panel? Or, like, a knife to survive, right?

So if that fascinates you—how do you make things? Or, like, why is the glass in my car transparent, yet protects me from the heat of the sun?—then this is something that you should really look into, if you have that particular type of curiosity.

Sarah Yang
Once someone gets actually into college, if they’re starting to pursue this, what are some of the main concepts or ideas that students in this field learn as an undergraduate?

Mary Scott
Material science really focuses a lot on how atoms are arranged in materials. And one thing that I feel is really unique to material science is we are always thinking about microstructures.

So, microstructure means not just how do atoms arrange themselves in a perfect crystal or a perfect environment where nothing is disrupting them, but more so—how do imperfections in materials influence their properties?

Disruptions to this perfect arrangement of atoms that you might learn about first in a textbook—what happens if I take an atom and replace it with another one? What happens if I start adding disruption to the crystal lattice?

Those are going to affect the material properties—its mechanical properties, so how strong it is; they’re going to affect the electronic properties—what is the conductivity and the resistivity. And actually, a lot of times, those are going to be positive influences on these properties.

So we actually want to control the microstructure. To control the microstructure, we need to measure the microstructure. And then once we’ve measured the microstructure, we want to design the microstructure.

That means we want to take the materials—whatever they may be—if it’s a metal we’re taking out of the ground and processing from ore into a usable metal, then we want to have that processing route produce not just the pure material at the end, but the material with a certain microstructure that is desirable.

Microstructure is always part of the material science design loop, though. It’s a little different than physics, where you might learn about perfect materials. And we joke about everything being a “spherical cow in physics” and it exists in a vacuum at zero Kelvin with no friction.

Material science is much more grounded in reality, because we say, hey, there are imperfections in this crystal, and that’s actually going to be a good thing a lot of the time.

And also, in chemistry, a lot of times people think about molecules and how they interact with each other, and, like, a very, very detailed picture of bonding.

But material science is more multiscale. We think about individual atoms, yes, but more so how they behave in the context of a solid, and how that ultimately translates to the bulk properties.

Sarah Yang
Talking about the direction of where material science is going now—what you see in the near future, and then maybe further out?

Mary Scott
You know, we talked about energy materials. Some of the materials that we need for batteries or for solar panels are very rare and precious on our planet, and we don’t have good routes to access them.

So lithium is a great example. We have lithium deposits in the United States. The current methods to extract lithium, to my knowledge, can be very damaging to the environment. And also, lithium is often present—and if it’s in a rock, there’s not a lot of lithium in that rock, so it’s hard to get.

Actually, I was on vacation with my family near Joshua Tree, and we went to a site where there’s a lot of geothermal energy production, and they are actually thinking of modifying some of these geothermal energy production centers to also extract the lithium that they see coming out from the ground.

The reason that they’re doing that is because it’s at a very high temperature and pressure already, so you wouldn’t have to spend that energy to do this in your lab, because that would probably make it a very energy-inefficient process.
So something like that—where we’re designing new routes to mine—is actually a super relevant topic.

Also, we have lots of e-waste in our country that often contains what we would call maybe a critical mineral, or a mineral like platinum or cobalt that we would not like to lose.

So this whole concept is broader than just mining. This also is something that people who work in the field of soft materials—making polymers and plastics—think about. There’s this concept of a closed-cycle material life, or really designing for the material life cycle.

Something that is easily recyclable, where you can really recover some component of the material with very high efficiency from a stream of basic garbage, to get that important component back and be able to process it into, you know, the bottom of your shoe or your water bottle again and again and again, and still maintain those good properties—of your Nalgene water bottle or the bouncy sole of your shoe.

That’s a real theme in material science right now as well.

And I would say one thing that I’m really personally excited about is also the rise of machine learning and using big data strategies to solve material science problems.

Computationally predicting material properties has been a real theme of material science research that’s taken off—I don’t know how long, since before I started my career.

But what’s happening now is we have much more powerful computers, and we’re able to, in a very high-throughput way, make predictions or guesses about materials properties.

So you can kind of point at the—this is an oversimplification—but you could point at the periodic table and say, “Oh, if I take atoms A, B, and C and shake them together, what kind of material do I get out?”

I mean, you could have a guess that might have some sort of uncertainty associated with it, but what’s really exciting about that is that now we start to see that this is more of a commodity, and it’s much easier to work with computational people, because we have so much more computing power.

They can make these calculations. They can make big databases like the Materials Project, and then this starts to be incorporated into our experimentation.

Laura Vogt
All I can say after our conversations in this episode is that I am really looking forward to hearing about the research that will continue to come from the Materials Science and Engineering Department.

I had no idea how many aspects of our lives need material scientists and engineers to make sure that it works—or how there is so much research around our natural resources and how we can use and mine them more efficiently.
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