Matthew Daly: What’s light as glass and strong as metal

Matthew Daly's dream car is made of glass.

Well, almost. Daly, a materials engineer in the College of Engineering, said his ideal automobile blends the lightness of ceramic with the armored safety of a metal exterior.

"Think about cars from 40 or 50 years ago," said Daly, who was named this year's Rising Star in Natural Sciences and Engineering. "They're clunky, heavy, not particularly stylish at all. When talking about the frame, vehicles today are sleeker and lower weight than their predecessors, but they're also much safer."

Daly wants to keep this progress rolling. As a materials engineer, he manipulates substances - metals, ceramics and organic elements like carbon - for engineering needs. His research seeks to make cars lighter without compromising safety.

Lighter cars require less fuel or, in the case of electric vehicles, less charge.

"Ideally, we're designing a car that can drive as far as you wanted, weighs nothing and is perfectly safe," he said.

Automobiles aren't the only application: Daly's research to create lighter but tougher materials could also help create more fuel-efficient airplanes and better turbines for generating power.

Typically, engineering labs focus on theory (solving problems with physical observation), computation (solving problems with digital modeling) or experiments (testing solutions in the real world). Daly's group does all three.

"No one tool can solve a big problem individually," he said.

A problem-solver at heart, Daly is drawn to "deep, thorny" problems that take time and attention. Often, he begins analyzing materials at their fundamental level: atoms.

"There are trillions upon trillions of atoms in a car," he said. "At UIC, I use electron microscopes to view materials in these smallest pieces. By seeing how atoms shuffle around each other when a material is stressed, we can understand the fundamental processes governing how they break and what makes them resilient. Then we hope to extend that understanding to something the size of a car or an airplane."

Just like an atom, Daly accomplishes with his colleagues what he couldn't do alone.

"You need to have a good team to succeed in science," he said. "Students and faculty members at UIC all rise together. I wouldn't have been able to win this award without help."