Materials (MATL)

Changing Tasks

by Markus Diener, associate researcher at the D-MATL

The objectives of the Department of Materials at ETH-Zurich are to conduct world-class materials research and to produce materials scientists and engineers who are educated at the highest level.

The Department of Materials is one of the fifteen departments belonging to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and is responsible for the education of engineers and scientists in the general field of materials science and engineering, and for the education of students from other departments in materials-related topics.

Besides education, the Department's main task consists of contributing to the development and improvement of new materials by research, and elucidating basic principles of materials science.

In both research and education, the Department is committed to the idea of materials science spanning many orders of magnitude in size scale, from atoms to products, and also stretching from highly fundamental studies to those with direct technological implications.

Active research areas include polymer physics, polymer chemistry and polymer technology, biomaterials, biointerfaces, and biomechanics, metal physics and technology, metals and metallurgy, structural and functional ceramics, surface functionalization, tribology, and crystallography.