Materials Engineering Ph.D.

Doctoral Program

The Ph.D. degree requires completion of 72 credit hours. Students must complete a the three (3) 4-credit MTLE core graduate courses: Advanced Structure and Bonding, Advanced Thermodynamics, and Advanced Kinetics; at least nine (9) additional credits from graduate level (6000-level) MSE department courses on materials characterization or computational materials science; and at the remaining additional 3- or 4-credit graduate level (6000-level) courses offered by the School of Engineering and/or the School of Science. The course selections must be approved by the student’s academic adviser and graduate curriculum coordinator prior to the enrollment in the courses.

The student must pass an oral preliminary examination covering the five core subjects, an oral candidacy examination presenting the Ph.D. thesis research proposal with preliminary results, and finally defend the Ph.D. thesis.

Outcomes of the Graduate Curriculum

Students who successfully complete this Ph.D. program will be able to:

• demonstrate knowledge of fundamentals underlying the relationship between the structure, property, and performance of materials.
• formulate, analyze, investigate and defend a dissertation on a research problem that clearly advances the state of knowledge in the field.
• demonstrate effective oral communication skills.
• write a research paper suitable for a peer-review publication.