Our History
The Mechanical Engineering Department was created one year after the 1912 opening of the University which at the time was known as the Rice Institute. It continued as a single entity until 1954, when Professor Franz Brotzen was hired as an Assistant Professor of Metallurgy and started the program of Materials Science. In 1962 Materials Science received a separate accreditation. As a result, the department was renamed the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department (MEMS). In the years that followed the department continued its success in the education of both undergraduate and graduate students, performing cutting edge research and collaborating with many institutions. These activities centered around and continue to center around the traditional areas of mechanical engineering and materials engineering: fluid mechanics, heat transfer, solid mechanics, dynamics and vibrations, control systems and robotics, solid thermodynamics, materials design and characterization, and thin film processing.
Today the department is involved in wide-ranging interdisciplinary work at the frontiers of science and knowledge. Collaboration with other departments, institutes, and colleges is commonplace. It's not uncommon to find faculty working with NASA to develop the next generation of space vehicles or interacting with the Baylor College of Medicine to develop new, groundbreaking orthopedic materials.
As new fields emerge, the MEMS faculty will be at the forefront pursuing research in robotics, neural networks, computational fluid mechanics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, and thin-film technology.
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