About MRL

Mission statement:

The mission of the MRL is to support the broad materials science and engineering community at MIT, to enable disciplinary and interdisciplinary research of benefit to society, to develop and sustain effective educational and societal outreach programs, and to engage with industry.

Summary Statement and Objective

The Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) will provide a unified nexus for support of interdisciplinary interactions among materials researchers within MIT. It will serve as a portal and mediator for external interactions with industry, government and other academic institutions. It will also partner with MIT.Nano and other organizations to provide the tools and research environments that promote research breakthroughs, and will build on a rich history of innovation and entrepreneurship in the MIT materials research community to help translate breakthroughs to technologies that impact society. The creation of the MRL will also better enable MIT to communicate to the public the profound role that materials research plays in creating and advancing all of the technologies that affect our daily lives.

The MRL encompasses research on energy conversion and storage, quantum materials, spintronics, photonics, metals, integrated microsystems, materials sustainability, solid-state ionics, complex oxide electronic properties, biogels, and functional fibers. These are all interdisciplinary topics in materials. Each plays a critical role with the focus on scientific discovery, and how to design and make materials that lead to systems that have improved performance or that enable new approaches to existing problems.