Johns Hopkins Materials Science and Engineering

08/29/2026

Great to see JHU MatSci alum Nathaniel McKeever ‘19 on stage at Meet the Flock this week addressing the incoming WSE freshman class.

McKeever graduated as a dual major in Materials Science and Engineering and Jazz Trumpet Performance at Peabody.

He told the Class of 2030 that he imagined life in college and after like "climbing a mountain of success," where you pass exams, get a certain GPA, work hard, and then graduation and dream jobs are an inevitability.

“And that is not remotely how my life in college or after college unfolded,” McKeever said. "Rather it is more akin to a road trip dreamt up by Dr. Seuss where I’d make some forward progress only to discover I was embarking on my first detour.”

His time at Johns Hopkins taught him to "have a plan, see how it unfolds, and then make an adjustment.”

McKeever is now an advanced lead engineer at GE Aerospace Research, as well as a touring musician in multiple bands.

08/25/2026

Principal investigators, faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and staff recently convened at the Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design Laboratory (AIMD-L) to discuss the future of AIMD-Net, newly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Programmable Cloud Laboratories network. The Hopkins-led team is one node among the network, which is dedicated to building a national group of remote-enabled and self-driving research laboratories. The AIMD-Net team discussed upcoming scientific, educational, and outreach efforts and met with working groups focused on advancing autonomous materials research. This effort is helping to build the infrastructure—and the workforce—needed to reimagine how materials are investigated and discovered.

Collaborators:
HEMI - Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute at Johns Hopkins University
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Northwestern University
University of Virginia
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Fordham University
Haverford College



AIMD-Net P*s:
Todd Hufnagel, David Elbert, Michael Shields, Benjamin Van Durme, Wei Chen

07/23/2026

With a new $20 million grant over four years, Johns Hopkins University engineers will help build a network of “self-driving” laboratories powered by robotic tools and artificial intelligence guidance.

The grant is part of a total $380 million announced today by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to link such autonomous laboratories into a network capable of cooperating on some of society’s most pressing problems.

The new program, called AIMD-Net, will develop AI tools and data infrastructure for the network, along with a specific scientific focus on development of advanced materials.

“Now, we can use AI to guide and inform our experiments to test new materials with a far more rapid pace, precision and larger scale than ever before,” says Todd Hufnagel, director of the Artificial Intelligence for Materials Design Laboratory in the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute.



https://engineering.jhu.edu/news/building-better-materials-for-extreme-conditions-gets-20-million-boost-at-johns-hopkins-engineering/

07/09/2026

The Department of Materials Science & Engineering is hiring!

If you or someone you know would make a great program administrator, coworker, and peer for our students, faculty, and staff, they can apply at hiring.jhu.edu/careers or reach out at [email protected].

07/07/2026

MatSci professor Patty McGuiggan's paper on Titan's mysterious "magic islands" just landed in the top 10% most-viewed papers published by Geophysical Research Letters in 2024!

This research was a collaboration between researchers at JHU, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Texas.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has an atmosphere full of methane and nitrogen that gets transformed by sunlight into complex organic molecules. It also has deep hydrocarbon lakes on its surface. What happens when all that organic material rains down onto Titan's surface and into its lakes?

Turns out, most of these compounds freeze into solids by the time they reach the ground.

Here's the cool part: some of these solids are porous, like sponges. The nitrogen trapped inside them can make them buoyant enough to float on Titan's lakes, rather than sinking to the bottom.

This might finally explain the "magic islands" - mysterious, temporary bright spots that NASA's Cassini probe spotted on Titan's lakes years ago. McGuiggan's research suggests they could be large, porous rafts of organic ice, floating for a while before eventually sinking as lakebed sediment.

Thanks to everyone who read, shared, and engaged with this work!

06/03/2026

Cancer has a sweet tooth—and that craving might be more revealing than scientists once thought.

MatSci Professor Howard Katz and Kevin Yarema in Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering have shown that exploiting tumor cells’ appetite for sugar can make stealthy pancreatic cancer proteins easier to detect.

Yarema and Katz's research was funded by a seed grant from the Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.

While the 5-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer has increased over the last decade to 13%, it continues to be one of the toughest cancers to diagnose and treat. One […]

05/19/2026

Blue Jays forever.

A big teary-eyed congratulations to all of our graduates!

05/13/2026

Baltimore students of all ages came to the Homewood campus last month to be wowed by materials science!

Materials Science Day was a student-run opportunity for community members to make slime, play with hydrogels, build crystal structures out of pretzel sticks and marshmallows, and watch elephant toothpaste foam up in an exothermic reaction.

05/05/2026

Celebrating our wonderful graduating Master's students.

04/27/2026

JHU MatSci student Vara Gunananthan and her group have been working on a sutureless mitral valve prosthesis for patients with sever mitral annular calcification to reduce operating times and improve patient outcomes.

Come see for yourself at the Whiting School of Engineering’s Design Day TOMORROW, April 28.