Under construction.

Current Status
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History
The U. C. Davis campus started out in 1908 as the University Farm, an agricultural experiment station and extension of the U. C. Berkeley campus and became a general campus in 1959. In 1961 it had an established department of Agricultural Engineering which was in the College of Agriculture. Joe Smith, then a member of the faculty in the Department of Food Science and Technology, initiated the effort to form the Department of Chemical Engineering and in 1964, one year after the College of Engineering was established, the Department of Chemical Engineering was established. By 1970 the Department had six faculty which increased to 12 during the 1980's and currently, including joint appointments in other departments, is XX.

Materials Science started out in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The Department of Mechanical Engineering itself was established in 1965 and two years later, in 1967, Bainer Hall was completed. In that same year Professor Mukherjee joined the faculty at Davis and taught the first materials science courses and in 1980 the Division of Materials Science and Engineering was formally established. By that time Professors Munir, Shackelford and Howitt had joined the faculty. During the 1980's Professors Needles and Zeronian from the Department of Textiles and Clothing received formal courtesy appointments in the division and Professors Gibeling, Groza and Rehfield joined the department. Professor Risbud came in 1990, bringing electronic and optical materials expertise to our program.

In 1993 the Division moved out of Bainer and Everson Halls and Chem Annex and in the newly completed building Engineering II (Recently renamed Kemper Hall of Engineering). At the same time it left Mechanical Engineering to join the Department of Chemical Engineering, reflecting an increasing interest in materials synthesis and processing.

Also in 1993 the Division established a Keck Solid-State NMR facility (since transferred to the campus's NMR facility) and Materials Science Central Facilities, a shared set of laboratories which are used for teaching and research, and outreach.  In 1997 Central Facilities adsorbed the electron microscopy component of the campus's Facility for Advanced Instrumentation and restored its own dormant electron microscopes to full operational status, updated the analytical capabilities of its TEM and acquired a new FEG-SEM through the NEAT initiative and an SAXS system which Dean Lavernia...  This facility has become a valuable asset to not only the department but also to researchers from across the campus.

Alexandra Navrotsky joined the department in 19xx as an interdisciplinary faculty member with joint appointments in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Chemistry, Geology...  Established the NEAT (Nanomaterials in the Environment, Agriculture and Technology) Initiative, ...

Very recently four new faculty have joined the division.  Enrique Lavernia and Julie Schoenung arrived in fall of 2002, ....  and later that year Nigel Browning, with a joint position with the National Center for Electron Microscopy, arrived, bringing expertise in high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and EELS.  Recently S. Kim...  In the span of only a few years the number of faculty in the division has increased from 6 to 12, doubling in size.

Faculty

Academic and Research Staff