Materials have always been interwoven throughout the very fabric of man's history. The present reawakening to the value and importance of materials, however, has become a dominant factor in manufacturing, national security, international competition and trade, consumer products (quality and reliability), and even education. Other renewals of interest have occurred over the centuries, probably beginning with the formation of the first pot from clay. These renewals were associated with discoveries such as copper, iron, and the transistor. However, in the past 40 years the base for renewed interest has broadened.

A true coupling of science and engineering into the field of materials was probably initiated in the 1940s and 1950s. Emphasis at that time was on metals and the “new” semiconductors, with an interest that incubated and grew to where their central position in national economies and man's daily life was recognized. In 1970 the National Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to conduct a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the field of “materials science and engineering.” The COSMAT report which resulted from that study had a dramatic impact on the field and has been a frame of reference for the past 17 years. These years have seen a virtual explosion of ideas, processes, and materials in the field.

There is considerable excitement and some turmoil in undergraduate and graduate education in the broad field of materials, as well as in its subfields of metallurgy, ceramics, and polymers. While the reasons are many, the underlying driver is the growth in the visibility and diversity of a young field evolving rapidly into a true discipline, much like chemical engineering and biology from their early roots mainly in chemistry.

The University Materials Council (UMC), the group representing accredited materials departments has had a longstanding, obvious interest in education and has been actively involved in assessing current and future directions. More recently, a comprehensive study under the auspices of the National Research Council (the Materials Science and Engineering Study), has been undertaken to develop a unified view of recent progress and new directions in materials science and engineering (MSE), and to assess future opportunities and needs. As part of this ambitious endeavor, a panel on education (Panel 5) was established with the following charges:

• To investigate and document existing human resources in MSE;

• To identify future directions of education in MSE, including education in and out of materials departments;

• To identify needs and opportunities for increasing interdisciplinarity in MSE; and

• To identify needs and opportunities in lifelong education.

Educational programs in materials science and engineering (MSE) departments must be comprehensive, addressing the main theme of structure-property-processing-application relationships in all materials. In addition, the programs must be dynamic in order to improve materials according to the requirements of our society. Dynamic materials limits and societal needs require the materials field to change constantly over relatively short times. In this respect, education in MSE differs substantially from that in traditional departments such as chemistry, physics, mechanical and chemical engineering, and even the more narrow fields of metallurgical, ceramics and polymer engineering.

It may be argued that all departments, scientific or engineering, are dynamic because they are constantly changing and maturing. Obviously, though, departments close to maturity change less rapidly than young departments. MSE, a young department, is changing rapidly from both steady evolutionary growth as well as quantum changes in scope (e.g., electronic materials). In fact, advances in MSE have necessitated a redefinition of scope for other fields. A good example is the field of computers and communication, which is directly tied to the growth, processing, and characterization of high purity semiconductor materials. The opposite is true as well (e.g., high transition temperature superconducting materials). The old adage of “a good design will be limited by the materials available” is true. As such, MSE plays a dual role—simultaneously advancing and impeding progress in other areas of science and engineering.

Forty years ago there were essentially no academic departments with titles of “Materials Science” or “Materials Engineering.” There were, of course, many materials departments. They were called “Metallurgy,” “Metallurgical Engineering,” “Mining and Metallurgy,” and other permutations and combinations. There were also a small number of “Ceramic” or “Ceramic Engineering” departments. Essentially none included “polymers.” Over the years titles have evolved via a route that frequently followed “Mining and Metallurgy,” to “Metallurgical Engineering,” to “Materials Science and Metallurgical Engineering,” and finally to “Materials Science and Engineering.” The evolution was driven by recognition of the commonality of material structure-property correlations and the concomitant broadening of faculty interests to include other materials. However, the issue is not department titles but whether a single degree option in materials science and engineering best serves the needs of students.

Few proponents of materials science and engineering dispute the necessity for understanding the relationships between processing (including synthesis), structure, and properties (including performance) of materials. However, can a single BS degree in materials science and engineering provide the background in these relationships for all materials and satisfy the entire market now served by several different materials degrees?

The issue is not whether “Materials Science and Engineering” departments or some other academic grouping of individuals with common interests should or should not exist.

The larger chemical companies worldwide are in the process of major change from a commodities orientation to “downstream” products. “Value-added products,” “engineered materials,” and “effect chemicals” are terms their leaders are using as they try to explain what is happening to their boards of directors, to their stockholders, to their employees, and to their customers.

As these companies go through their reorganizations a major problem has become apparent — many professional chemists are not intellectually equipped by training and experience to be effective in research and development in the design of those new products, and the “pipeline” which is producing their “new hires” has not responded to the changing emphases needed in undergraduate curricula and graduate research programs in chemistry.

The driving force behind this new orientation is coming to be known as the science of materials or materials science. The longer descriptor, materials science and engineering, better suggests its inherently broad and interdisciplinary nature as well as bringing out that how the final product is produced affects (and may effect) its properties. Because this new discipline moves across standard science and engineering boundaries, materials science does not lend itself to neat classification. Descriptive classification is nevertheless possible:

• Materials science is solid state science, both solid state chemistry and solid state physics.

What constitutes a strong multidisciplinary program in materials? Does a strong multidisciplinary program require strong disciplines? What are the differences (if any) between interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary programs? Are thrust areas essential components of a good multidisciplinary program? What is the role of central facilities in multidisciplinary research and education? Are there intrinsic differences between the activities of graduate students in multidisciplinary and single-investigator programs? Is peer review appropriate and, equally important, feasible for large multidisciplinary programs?

This family of questions is of increasing interest and some concern in both the academic and funding segments of the national materials community. It does not appear to be a major issue in either the industrial or national laboratory arenas, where the funding practices, organizational patterns, and in some respects the research and development goals, are different from those in the research universities. An essential distinction is the presence of a formal education component in the graduate materials programs in the universities. However, in discussions of academic materials research programs, both funder and (regrettably) fundee occasionally relegate purely educational aspects to the background.

Multidisciplinary and block-funded programs are a steadily increasing fraction of the total research support in materials available to universities. Some 30 years ago virtually all university research in materials-related subjects was supported through single-investigator grants.

The strength, vitality, and development of the materials professions are determined largely by the quality of education of their new members. While this truism applies to any profession, it is critically important that it be recognized in a rapidly changing and evolving area such as the materials field, which includes activities in materials engineering, ceramic engineering, polymer engineering, and metallurgical engineering. The recent development of tools and techniques that allow relating details of atomic and electronic structure to material properties, the discovery of new classes of materials, many of which are complex integrations of metals, ceramics, and/or polymers, along with the rich diversity of new processing methods that yields improved properties and new materials concepts, are examples that emphasize the dynamic and exciting nature of the field.

The primary responsibility for monitoring, evaluating, and certifying the quality of engineering and engineering-related education in colleges and universities in the United States lies with ABET, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. (For a discussion of accreditation in chemistry, see “Chemistry Education Programs Relevant to Materials Science” by P. Lykos in this issue.) ABET, working with the engineering professional societies, develops accreditation policies and criteria and conducts a comprehensive program of evaluation of first professional engineering degree programs. Programs meeting the prescribed criteria are granted accredited status.

Electronic materials constitutes a sub-field of materials. Therefore the issues raised concerning an electronic materials education must necessarily be viewed in the broader context of a comprehensive materials education. Yet electronic materials do differ from other subfields in several ways.

First, unlike the traditional metals, ceramics and polymers, which are defined primarily by chemical composition, electronic materials are defined by functions, i.e., they are used in devices that provide electronic functions. As such, electronic materials encompass metals, ceramics, and polymers as well as semiconductors.

Second, workers employed in electronic materials industries come from a diverse set of academic disciplines. They are physicists, chemists, chemical engineers, electrical engineers, and mechanical engineers as well as metallurgists, ceramists, and materials science and engineering (MSE) graduates. Thus activities in the electronic materials industries represent an extreme case of interdisciplinary activity which is characteristic of MSE.

Third, the electronic materials industries play a dominant role in world economy today and the technology is changing at a dizzying pace. Thus issues in education in electronic materials become more challenging than other subfields and may require fresh and nontraditional approaches.

When speaking of electronic materials, one generally thinks of semiconductors, such as silicon and more recently gallium arsenide, that are used in microelectronic devices.

Recently, the words “metamict” or “metamictization” have been increasingly used instead of “amorphous” or “amorphization” in acknowledgment of the fact that the first recognized example of the transition from the crystalline to the aperiodic state was in natural materials—minerals. The term (originally “metamikte” from Greek for “mix otherwise” because of their complex compositions) was first defined by Broegger in a Danish encyclopedia as one of three classes of amorphous substances: porodine (= colloidal), hyaline, and metamikte. Minerals considered to be metamict were judged amorphous because of their conchoidal fracture and isotropic optical properties; however, well-developed crystal faces evidenced the prior crystalline state.

Hamberg was the first to suggest that metamictization is a radiation-induced, periodic-to-aperiodic phase transition caused by alpha particles which originate from constituent radionuclides in the uranium and thorium decay series. Rinne and Vegard confirmed by x-ray diffraction studies that metamict minerals were either amorphous or finely crystalline. Later work supported the idea of a radiation-induced transformation. The work of Stackelberg and Rottenbach established that the decrease in density, refractive indices, and birefringence correlated with the breakdown of the structure with increasing alpha-decay dose. Stackelberg and Rottenback tried to test this hypothesis directly by bombarding a thin slab of zircon with alpha particles. The results were inconclusive because the slab fractured, but this must have been one of the first experiments in which an “ion beam” was used to “modify” a material.