Research Groups

Faculty members lead their individual research groups which typically consist of a mixture of PhD, MS and BS students, and often include Postdoctoral fellows.  Please consult the faculty pages for details (Faculty Profiles). In addition, faculty at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering lead two multi-university research centers and two UNT research clusters.  Dr. Mishra led a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC).

NSF I/UCRC programs

Dr. Mishra works with faculty from Brigham Young University, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, the University of South Carolina, and Wichita State University in the Center for Friction Stir Processing (CFSP).  In this I/UCRC effort Dr. Mishra collaborates with Boeing, General Motors, Magnesium Elektron, US Army Research Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, and Pacific Northwest Laboratory to develop friction stirring as a means of joining metals and creating new metal microstructures. 

Drs. BanerjeeDahotreMishra, and Srivilliputhur along with researchers at the Colorado School of Mines, Ohio State University, and nine industrial partners form the Center for Advanced Non-Ferrous Structural Alloys (CANFSA) that conducts state-of-the-art research related to non‐ferrous structural alloys.

Research clusters

Materials Modeling Research Cluster (MMRC) includes researchers from materials science and engineering, chemistry, and other disciplines to develop and apply advanced modeling and simulation techniques in order to improve the design and performance of new and existing materials.  Current areas of research include aging effects on the performance of light weight and aerospace materials, catalysis and alternate energy generation,  the behavior nanostructured materials, and interaction of radiation with materials. A particular emphasis at the University of North Texas is fostering the close interaction between computational and experimental research.Faculty researchers who work in the Computational Materials Modeling Group include Jincheng DuSrinivasan Srivilliputhur, and Zhenhai Xia.

The continued development of nanoscale materials and devices raises the need to analyze the properties and performance of surfaces — the natural physical limit of any device or component. Underlying phenomena contributes to surface degradation (e.g. corrosion, wear, creep, and fatigue) due to their interactions with the surrounding environment, often with significant cost to industry and the national economy. The Multi-scale Surface Science and Engineering research cluster studies the properties and performance of surfaces developing strategies to arrest surface degradation, enhance performance, improve sustainability and extend the lifetime of materials.  A multi-departmental effort, this cluster combines expertise in surface engineering with experimental multi-scale engineering for materials analysis, from the atomic scale to the macro scale. MTSE faculty members involved in this cluster include Drs. DahotreBanerjeeScharf, and Srivilliputhur.