Researchers have developed a new kind of "camera" that sees the local disorder in materials. Its key feature is a variable shutter speed: because the disordered atomic clusters are moving, when the team used a slow shutter, the dynamic disorder blurred out, but when they used a fast shutter, they could see it. The new method doesn't work like a conventional camera--it uses neutrons to measure atomic positions with a shutter speed of around one picosecond, a trillion times faster than normal camera shutters. Video produced by Oak Ridge National Laboratory

This work shows a breakthrough by Columbia Engineers to create porous polymer coating and achieve cooling even under strong sunlight. The work entitled "Hierarchically Porous Polymer Coatings for Highly Efficient Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling" is published in Science Magazine on Sep 27, 2018.

Read the full interview in Columbia Engineering magazine. After almost a decade of long-distance collaborations, Keren Bergman, Michal Lipson, and Alex Gaeta are working together in one place, here at Columbia Engineering. Lipson and Gaeta joined the School this summer as the Eugene Higgins Professor in Electrical Engineering (EE) and the David M. Rickey Professor of Applied Physics and of Materials Science, respectively. And now, together with Bergman, who is the Charles Batchelor Professor and EE chair, the trio is set to break new ground in nanophotonics, or, as Lipson, a preeminent leader in nanophotonic fabrication, puts it, “optics on a very, very small scale.”

Video demonstrating flexibility of Yang's lithium-ion battery powering a smart watch, in flat, flexed, and twisted configurations.

Materials science pioneer Katayun Barmak takes you behind the scenes at Columbia Nano Initiative’s new Electron Microscopy lab where researchers probe the nature of materials at the nanoscale.

In order to see inside nanomaterials and learn how nanoparticles evolve, Simon Billinge, applies the world’s newest and brightest synchrotron light source—the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory A physicist with a joint position at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science and Brookhaven, Billinge gives us a tour of his workflow at NSLS-II.

Sponsored by Columbia's Women Inventors Network and by Women in Science @ Columbia, this discussion takes a deep dive into the tale of three scientists' journey from innovation to spinout and what life is like at the intersection of university research and the commercial sector.

Simon J. L. Billinge, winner of the 2025 MRS Innovation in Materials Characterization Award, sits down with MRS TV to discuss data analysis algorithms in materials science and how they've evolved with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Colin Fink. Pioneering Electrochemistry / Computation and Materials Discovery Alan C. West, Samuel Ruben–Peter G. Viele Professor of Electrochemistry and Professor of Chemical Engineering Chris Marianetti, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics