Smart Materials

Materials Chemistry

One of the most talked about areas of materials research over the last few years is materials chemistry. A look at the MRS Fall Meeting program reveals at least seven symposia which could be considered as those under the domain of materials chemistry and a number of more focused meetings are also taking place, such as the Inorganic Materials Conference in September in Versailles. However, there is a lot of debate about what materials chemistry actually is. There are some who say materials chemists are just chemists in search of funding similar to how the physics community leaned hungrily towards materials science in search of funding over the last decade. At the other end of the spectrum there are those that take a universal view and include solid-state chemistry, carbon science and even polymer science in their definition. Of course, the truth lies between these two extreme cases and there are various committees around the world, including the NSF in the USA, engaged in trying to pin the definition down.