Welcome to Materials and Textiles at U. Mass. Dartmouth

The Materials and Textiles department has roots going back over 100 years to Bradford Durfee and New Bedford Textile Schools. The textile industry is still important in this area but is typified more and more by specialty products like Velcro or the vascular grafts made by Boston Scientific. Our courses are changing to reflect this shift from large-scale manufacturing to the research, development and high-tech production that is the basis of much of the new business of New England.

When you choose an undergraduate major, one thing you can be sure of is that the world you will work in will be greatly changed from how it is now. None of us know exactly how but two major trends are obvious. One is that biology and engineering will continue to merge. Machines will become softer, technology will become "calmer" and will work with us in a less intrusive fashion and medicine will become more of a branch of engineering. A second trend is that things will be made more and more by automated equipment and people will spend more and more of their time devising, designing and developing new things. This is not to say we will all be engineers. Managing, designing, socializing and understanding change will be just as important as ever.

Our new undergraduate options reflect this vision of the future by applying our understanding of soft, flexible and fibrous materials to include soft materials in general: biological materials, biomedical materials and composites as well as textiles. We are keeping our tradition of having two main threads, a general option which combines materials technology with a business minor and an engineering option with a higher emphasis on new areas of technology in place of the business courses.

Our graduate program continues to emphasize fundamental research on textiles and fibers at the Master's level and we also offer a PhD through the Biomedical Engineering program.

New England experiences a cycle of growth and decay like any living thing. Our good fortune here is that the new growth can spring straight from the existing roots. This website has examples of these new growth areas. Join us and help to build this new world.

Paul Calvert
Department Chair