UCL Institute for Materials Discovery

The UCL Institute for Materials Discovery (IMD) has relationships across the 3 faculties within the BEAMS school: the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MAPS), the Faculty of Engineering Science, and the Bartlett, and also with the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

UCL’s world-leading research in new materials and related areas that span a wide range of disciplines across the institution:

• to integrate fundamental chemistry, physics, materials, engineering and biological principles across the disciplines
• to create new opportunities in materials creation, discovery and exploitation for the development of clean energy, nanotechnology, engineering and biomedicine technologies.
• to accelerate and integrate materials discovery, together with sustainable and economical processing into novel products and applications

The Expertise

Focus on delivery

The IMD is focused on delivering the next generation of advanced materials designed to tackle the major global problems in:

• Energy
• Healthcare
• Telecommunication
• Transport

The People

To carry out this research the IMD has a core team of researchers and a wider community of collaborators and partners: find out more on our People page.

Research Partners

When all of this experience is combined the IMD can call on materials pioneers with experience in a vast and wide-ranging spectrum of fields from chemistry to mathematics, engineering to medicine!

Core Strategies

With five core strategies the IMD intends to deliver step-changes in advanced materials:

• Integrating the fundamental principles of chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering and biology
• Utilising a combination of computational, experimental and engineering research
• Combining sustainability with economic viability to develop processing technologies
• Working alongside industry to consider the commercial impact and meet current and future needs
• Considering materials development from theory through to scale-up demonstration to maximise efficiency