Materials Scientist
Job Summary
Responsible for examining the properties of substances, such as its structure, composition, and function, to develop new and better products and materials.
Primary Responsibilities
- Observe the structures, compositions, reactions, and other properties of substances.
- Advise on proper chemical processing and testing procedures, such as ingredients, mixing times, and operating temperatures.
- Create new products and processes or improve existing ones.
- Work to develop new and improved drugs, plastics, cleaners, and thousands of other products.
- Determine ways to strengthen or combine materials or develop new materials for use in a variety of products.
- Work on teams with other scientists, such as biologists and physicists, computer specialists, and engineers.
- Work with biologists to develop new drugs and with engineers to design ways to mass produce them.
- Study properties of various natural and synthetic or composite materials, including metals, alloys, rubber, ceramics, semiconductors, polymers, and glass.
- Work alongside glass scientists, ceramic scientists, metallurgical scientists, and polymer scientists.
- Investigate the relationship between the structure of materials at atomic or molecular scales and their macroscopic properties.
- Manipulate the defects in crystalline materials such as precipitates, grain boundaries, interstitial atoms, vacancies or substitutional atoms, to create materials with the desired properties.
- Extract materials and convert into useful forms.
