The Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals is a newly established department, founded in April 2021. The department's principal aim is to address challenging issues at the forefront of science and technology while also meeting the demands of the kingdom. Along with offering the graduate program, the MSE department at KFUPM is the first and only department in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region to offer a dedicated undergraduate MSE program. This is an interdisciplinary field that relies on knowledge from many engineering and fundamental scientific disciplines. This enables us to figure out the underlying mechanisms that govern the matter around us to tackle the numerous engineering problems that our society faces. This multidisciplinary approach is instilled in both undergraduate and graduate students through coursework and research.

The study of MSE involves exploring the links between material structure and properties, as well as designing and engineering materials based on those structure-property correlations. Materials science is a highly active area of research that encompasses a broad range of topics such as polymer science, composites, nanomaterials, computational materials science, and so on. Our faculty members are extremely involved in research and have committed to be role models for students. They regularly engage in cutting-edge research to apply these concepts to solve problems in a variety of sectors, including water treatment, membrane design, and solid-state batteries, to mention a few.

Our department's mission is to support the individual development of our exceptional and innovative students so that they can continue to push the field to ever more beneficial breakthroughs. Our students are equipped with the necessary knowledge to understand the material's structure-performance relationship, materials degradation, and failure analysis, and a systematic approach to materials selection for a specific application. They obtain hands-on expertise in synthesis, and characterization, as well as experimental design at even the undergraduate level.