The Materials Processing Center (MPC) provides an environment where industry, government, and academia collaborate to identify and address pivotal multidisciplinary issues in materials processing and manufacturing.
MPC focuses on strengthening its intellectual community, enhancing industrial outreach, and providing superior administrative support. It creates partnerships with industry to focus research and education on industrially relevant issues for the electronics, transportation, primary materials, construction, energy, and biomaterials sectors.
The Microphotonics Center (http://mphotonics.mit.edu/) is a center within MPC that builds interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing basic materials science and emerging technology in integrated photonic systems. It serves as a research community in which industry, government, and academia collaborate to create new materials, structures, and architectures for the emerging "microphotonics platform"—the menu of on-chip and circuit-board level devices and components that will comprise future optoelectronics for telecommunications, computing, and sensing.
In keeping with MIT's educational mission, MPC cosponsors the MPC/CMSE Summer Scholar Program, inviting outstanding undergraduate students nationwide to participate in ongoing MIT materials research.
With its Industry Collegium, MPC acts as the primary window to industry for MIT's materials community. Collegium member companies benefit from this liaison with MIT in many ways. Publications promoting materials processing activities at MIT are distributed widely to industrial and government contacts. MPC sponsors a major workshop and a materials research poster session during its Materials Day celebration each fall. In cooperation with MIT's Industrial Liaison Program (http://ilp-www.mit.edu/), MPC and the Microphotonics Center also provide a forum for industrial representatives to discuss their needs and problems one-on-one with MIT faculty and researchers. MPC also encourages exchanges between academia and industry, through visiting scientist and adjunct faculty appointments and industrial internship educational opportunities.
Major industrial partners collaborate with faculty to carry out larger-scale, focused research initiatives. The Microphotonic Industry Consortium creates a proactive forum where scientists, engineers, and strategists from industry and MIT can work as partners in exploring and pursuing innovative microphotonics research and development. Consortium member companies also participate in the Communications Technology Roadmap Project, which provides technology development targets for the long-term evolution of photonic component integration (http://mph-roadmap.mit.edu/).
For more information on the Materials Processing Center or the Microphotonics Center, contact Dr. George B. Kenney, associate director, Room 12-007, MIT, 617-253-3244, gbkenney@mit.edu.