The beauty of materials science is that it looks to nature for inspiration in designing materials. But there’s also just the merging of two different disciplines—engineering and biology. Materials scientist Robert Ritchie of the University of California, Berkeley says there’s a reason to be excited about combining these two fields.

"You’ve seen this in universities with all these bioengineering departments springing up. And I think it’s an interesting endeavor because my generation most engineers don’t know much biology. And most biologists don’t know engineering. And so it has been a difficult connection. But now the future generation is much more versed in both fields. So I think you’ll see a lot of interesting progress. And particularly in medicine, just think engineers have gotten into medicine now. And we have much more sophisticated ways of examining, these CAT scans and so forth; that has all come from the union of biology and engineering. So I think this is quite an exciting period for that."