The Research activities in the Materials Science Department of the University of Patras focus on the study of advanced materials promising technological applications. Research can be divided in three large fields (i) molecular materials, (ii) biomaterials, and (iii) micro and nano-phase materials. Examples of such materials under study are (a) ceramic materials, polymers, glasses, metals, liquid crystals, composite and smart materials, (b) semiconductors, magnetic materials, nanomaterials, photonic materials, and in general molecular materials which have applications in optoelectronics, electronics and telecommunications, and (c) biomaterials, biocompatible materials, materials with applications in pharmaceutics, dentistry and medicine. These research activities embrace theoretical studies, materials modeling and design, the synthesis and growth of materials and structures, materials characterization, investigation of functional properties, processing, manipulation and activation, and finally the integration of devices for high technology applications.
The research excellence of the Department is reflected on the number of publications and the number citations. The department started operations in 2000 and it was staffed gradually over a period of more than a decade. The graph on the right presents the number of publications with address the Department of Materials Science. The data has been drawn from THOMSON-REUTERS ISI- Web of Science (date of search: 31/07/2013 and keywords: ad=Dept Mat Sci SAME Univ Patras). A total number of 604 publications have appeared since 2001. It is deduced that the number of publications has reached a plateau of 70-80 publications per year since 2010, when the Department has reached a maximum of 17 members of academic staff. What it is not reflected on this graph is the high impact factor of the Journals where the academics publish and the fact that several of these publications are coauthored by undergraduate and postgraduate students of the Department.
Moreover, these publications have attracted a wide attention from the scientific community worldwide. The graph on the left presents the annual number of citations received by the above publications recorded. The number of citations presents an almost exponential growth and reaches a maximum value of about 2000 citations for 2012. Up to 31/07/2013 the publications of Department of Materials Science have attracted almost 10,000 citations, although these publications are very recent in time. The number of citing articles is 7665 and the average number of citations per publication in about 16.5, resulting to h-index=44.
With the above results, the Department of Materials Science of the University of Patras processes top position in academic performance among the Departments of Natural Sciences and Engineering in Greece.