Krystyn Van Vliet

Prof. Van Vliet earned her Sc.B. in Materials Science & Engineering from Brown University (1998) and her PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT (2002). Van Vliet joined MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) as a faculty member in 2004 and received a dual appointment to the MIT Department of Biological Engineering in 2011. She has authored or co-authored over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and holds several patents. Van Vliet also serves as director of manufacturing innovation within MIT’s Innovation Initiative, a campus-wide program that helps turn research advances and ideas into fully-realized technologies.

Van Vliet’s laboratory studies material chemomechanics: the dynamic coupling between mechanical & chemical states at material interfaces. To identify the fundamental mechanisms of such interactions at the molecular scale, her group develops experiments and computational simulations that span material mechanics, chemistry, physics, and biology. Van Vliet has developed several new undergraduate and graduate classes in Materials Science & Engineering (MIT’s Course 3) and Biological Engineering (MIT’s Course 20), of which this is one.