The College-Wide Interdisciplinary Materials Science and Engineering Graduate Program
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ency is to compartmentalize knowledge with the concomitant académie provincialism. This mindset poses a particularly serious problem for a number of subject areas that are intrinsically multidisciplinary. Several examples in the field of engineering science are biomédical engineering, manufacturing and industrial engineering, nuclear engineering, environmental engineering and also materials science and engineering. The interdisciplinary graduate program provides a mechanism for accommodating thèse cross-disciplinary fields within the framework of an existing departmental structure.
The college-wide interdisciplinary graduate program is a viable alternative to the departmental structure... What is an Interdisciplinary Graduate Program? An interdisciplinary graduate program is best described in the context of an existing departmental structure. An interdisciplinary graduate program has a program director (chair), graduate advisor, and faculty with appropriate administrative
support. It is similar to a department in many respects. It consists of graduate faculty who develop curricula, award degrees, report through a director to the dean of the graduate school, recruit students, define doctoral candidacy requirements, and address matters both internai and external to the university that bear on the program and its participants. A distinctive feature of an interdisciplinary graduate program is that its faculty hâve appointments in différent departments. Matters of tenure, salary, and promotion are not vested in the program, but réside in the home departments of each faculty member. Institutional resources such as permanent equipment, graduate fellowships, professorships, and staff salaries may or may not be directly controlled by the faculty in the program. When they are not, faculty in the program may pool departmental allocations. Advantages of an Interdisciplinary Graduate Program A major advantage of the interdisciplinary graduate program structure is that faculty with a common interest in a broad base technical area can be easily gathered from various departments and even collèges. The materials science and engineering field encompasses mechanical behavior and structural materials (mechanical engineering), continuum and applied mechanics (engineering mechanics), polymers (chemistry and chemical engineering), electronic behavior (electrical engineering), and the fundamental nature of materials (physics). It is the same set of disciplines required to attack the four parts of the materials science and engineering tetrahedron: synthesis/processing, structure/composition, properties, and performance. A materials science and engineering graduate program facilitâtes collaboration and identity as a materials group with a minimum of administrative overhead. Faculty participating in the materials science and engineering graduate program may supervise students registered in materials science or in a spécifie department, depending on the student's choice. Students registered in the graduate program pursue master's and doctoral
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