As the founding editor of Cell Press's first materials science journal Matter, launching in the summer of 2019, it's been challenging to define the scope of a publication encompassing such a broad field. We state we are interested in materials of any state, any scale, any composition—i.e., any matter—with scientific or technological interest, theoretical or otherwise. The journal Matter will embrace all significant advances in materials research, encompassing the previously unknown and the innovative.

What gets me excited about the content we'll publish? Here are five trends in materials science that I expect will likely be featured to various extents in Matter in 2019 and beyond.

1. Additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) is more commonly referred to as 3D printing, which has been gaining traction in modeling and prototyping applications in recent years. AM offers two distinct advantages over traditional materials synthesis: (1) precision and (2) customization. These features are typically challenging to make economically viable. AM has changed that perspective. Beyond plastics such as ABS and PLA, the real advantage of AM will occur with the usage of different materials across different scales, including metals, functional materials, and biomaterials. The ability to efficiently 3D print steel and concrete will revolutionize construction. The technology to print customized implants with biocompatible materials for heart stents, ENT implants, hip replacements, etc. will transform the way we view "personalized" healthcare. Nanoscale electronics may be able to be printed to order, similar to printed circuit boards, leading to a new age of nanorobotics. Even atom-by-atom placement could be in the future, enabling the fine-tuning and manipulation of materials at the smallest scales.

2. Machine learning

The process of materials discovery and development has historically been inefficient. Researchers—aka people—design, conduct, analyze, and interpret results obtained through experiments and/or simulations, and they could easily miss something. Can we exploit algorithms and "Big Data" to discover new materials and optimize current systems? Efforts such as the Materials Genome Initiative address this issue through data-driven techniques, increasingly utilizing methods from statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret and model materials data. The result is an acceleration of materials discovery and a strengthened ability to draw scientific insights from complex data. The combination of machine learning with materials science has broad implications for the future of research processes, including the discovery of new materials and fine-tuned properties and performance.

3. Green

The green materials trend encompasses two main areas: energy and sustainability. By energy, I mean all new developments in materials meant to store, create, transfer, or transform energy. This includes photovoltaics, hydrogen storage platforms, superconductors, supercapacitors, etc. Materials development has driven battery technology to power your iPhone as well as Tesla cars. By sustainability, I mean efforts that are using and producing materials more efficiently, from a life-cycle perspective. As an example, many beach fronts are being threatened by the abundant usage of plastics because of their super long lifetime of generally hundreds of years (we've even started banning drinking straws). Discovering new materials and methods is thus becoming of high demand to efficiently degrade plastics. This is a difficult challenge in polymer science, requiring understanding and control of interactions all the way down to the molecular and atomistic scales.

4. Bio____

I call this area "bio____" to cover both bio-materials—e.g., protein-based materials such as silk and elastin, DNA, RNA, lipids, and natural systems such as shells, feathers, bone, and wood—and bio-inspired systems—e.g., brick-and-mortar-type systems that copy the structure of nacre. Many lessons can be drawn from nature's extended research and development program (e.g., evolution), which has produced some of the world's best high-performance materials with efficient synthesis methods, restricted ingredients, and limited environmental impact. Beyond learning from nature's materials, we also want to copy it for technological means—a drive toward synthetic cells and cell components, e.g., protein aggregates for advanced enzymatic activities for industrial-scale applications. The future production of some materials will not be synthesized; they will be grown.

5. Complexity

As technologies advance, we can manipulate materials with more and more precision, heralding unprecedented control of a material's nano- and microstructure. Material with hierarchies of various complex geometries and architectures results in vastly different properties and behaviors, even if the system is made with the same base components. Can such multiscale topologies be optimized? Given a set of components, what is the range of properties achievable? This so-called building block problem has been tackled from various angles, resulting in metamaterials that can be tuned based on structure.





These five topics in no way encompass all of materials science. Nor do they encapsulate all significant emerging areas. They just reflect my own humble opinion today. Indeed, to keep things objective, I did not even include one of my own areas of expertise—low-dimensional materials such as graphene (2D) and carbon nanotubes (1D) and quantum dots (0D). Nor did I mention computational materials science (e.g., developments in ab initio modeling). Or metamaterials. Or catalytic and separation materials. The list goes on and on.

What would be on your list? Tweet me at @CranfordMATTER and be sure to sign up to receive updates on Matter below.