What is Materials Science?
Those of us in this exciting and important field of science and engineering know what it is but often have difficulty in defining it. The National Research Council in a report on the status of the field stated that:

Materials have been central to the growth, prosperity, security, and quality of life of humans since the beginning of history.

Certainly materials have been of such importance that periods of human history (stone age, bronze age, etc...) have been named after them and materials were the enabling technology of the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays materials continue to have a central role in many areas of our lives. One of the conclusions of the National Research Council report was that:

Materials science and engineering is crucial to the success of industries that are important to the strength of the U.S. economy and U.S. defense.

The developments that have occurred in materials over the past thirty or forty years have been meteoric. High temperature superconductors, organic semiconductors, advanced composites, biomaterials, superalloys, nanostructured materials are all examples of our ingenuity in creating new and improved materials. Our growing ability to tailor materials from the atomic level upwards (nanotechnology) is one of the great achievements of materials science and will lead to the creation of presently unimaginable new devices and components. Materials science is a field that offers great intellectual challenges. It is a field that thrives on interdisciplinary research in particular as it broadens into new and varied areas such as supramolecular chemistry, self-assembling structures, biotechnology and computer modeling and simulation.