The Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST is known as the world-wide leader, based on its broad and in-depth education, highly regarded faculty, top-notch research activities on metals, ceramics, glasses, electronic materials, composites, nano/bio materials, and high caliber of students. Research areas of our faculty range from pure science to advanced technologies, which involve broad perspectives of chemistry, physics, electronics, design, computational science, and entrepreneurial businesses.

Today’s rapid growth of the department comes from its ability to relate education to engineering practice for the emerging technologies in the 21st century, so called 5-Ts including nanotechnology (NT), information technology (IT), biotechnology (BT), environment technology (ET), and space technology (ST). The department provides theoretical and experimental resources available for conducting researches in these advanced technologies. The new materials with specific properties and their processing techniques are currently developed in strong collaborations with various governmental agencies and materials-related industries in electronics, aerospace, automobile, chemical and energy.

The Brain Korea 21 (BK21) program has been delivered by Korean Ministry of Education to develop high quality human resources in Korea for the 21st century. The objective of BK21 is to support a few selected nation’s top universities to enhance education and research levels of their graduate programs in Science and Technology fields, aiming to make the world-class research-oriented graduate schools by the 21st century.

Nowadays our society has been in rapid transformation to a high technology and information-oriented society. At the same time, the need for human welfare and environmental improvement has been great. To meet these demands and to improve the competitive power of our industries, the conventional exclusive classification of research and development in metals, ceramics, and electronic materials should be superseded. In its place, a more inclusive interdisciplinary research and development approach to various materials is required.

The center consists of the materials programs at KAIST and at K-JIST (Kwang-Ju Institute of Science and Technology), focusing on two research areas: basic materials science and seed technology, and application specific materials technology, which include nine project groups: interface science, computational materials science, semiconductor materials, dielectric materials, magnetic materials, optical materials, electronic packaging, electro-chemical materials, and structural materials.

International University Joint Symposia on Materials Science and Engineering are held annually to attract researchers from around the world, which currently consist of the three UCSB/KAIST/K-JIST, KAIST/Kyoto, and Tohoku/KAIST/K-JIST joint workshops. These symposia are generally separate from annual professional society meetings, and they are terrific opportunities for students to meet and talk with many experts doing specialized research.