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How your Donation Supports BIMR

The world’s population relies on materials for its survival on a daily basis. We continually encounter new materials that improve our lives and enable us to reach new frontiers of exploration. Whether it’s the hydrogel contact lens that helps us see, the titanium and polyethylene joint replacement that helps us walk, the copper interconnects in our microprocessors that help us perform calculations, or the carbon fiber composites in the heat shield that enables space craft to land on Mars, constant improvement to new materials is required for future advancement.

However, materials can also be the source of challenging problems that humanity must face. Millions of tonnes of plastic waste are filling our landfills and polluting our oceans. We use enormous amounts of energy and fossil fuels to produce the silicon, rubber, steel, and plastic that we use on a daily basis. Our internal combustion engines continue to produce carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. To address these and many other challenges, we require new research in sustainable materials, biodegradable plastics, energy harvesting materials, more efficient batteries, advanced water filtration membranes, and new lower-energy production processes.

The Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research (BIMR), named after McMaster’s only Nobel Laureate, strives to build a community of researchers working together to solve these challenging problems in Materials research. We strive to support world-leading research in printed organic electronics, sustainability in materials manufacturing, development of biomaterials for drug delivery and prosthetics, energy harvesting and storage materials, design and testing of personal protective equipment, advanced filtration membrane engineering, and numerous other important areas.