Advanced Materials & Manufacturing | Roger E. Susi Interdisciplinary Research Building

An artist's rendering of the Advanced Materials & Manufacturing cluster inside the ISEB building.

What is the Advanced Materials & Manufacturing focused research cluster?

The Advanced Materials & Manufacturing research cluster at Case Western Reserve University is exploring new technologies and manufacturing techniques to develop better components and production processes.

The cluster’s interdisciplinary team is driven to discover and understand new materials and processes that impact energy, human health, and quantum technologies while training Case Western Reserve University students for the workforce in advanced manufacturing.

The Advanced Materials & Manufacturing cluster is a hub for innovation. The team researches the entire life of a material: from creating something that never existed before through synthesis, to optimizing the performance through formulation, to scale up with processing, and characterization from the most fundamental scales of an individual electron, molecule, or particle to a final consumer product you can hold in your hands.

Researchers in the Advanced Materials & Manufacturing cluster develop and apply cutting-edge technologies in more than 8,000 square feet of experimental lab space on the ground and first floors of the Roger E. Susi Interdisciplinary Research Building. This includes $1.75 million of equipment obtained through the Advanced Product Manufacturing Technologies Initiative.

Instrumentation, Tools and Resources

Advanced and custom optical microscopy tools
Rheometry
Dynamic light scattering
High-throughput pipetting robotics
Advanced lab scale coating application
Additive manufacturing
Custom built spectroscopy
Electrospun polymerization
Interfacial measurement tools
Humidity controlled facility for casting
Large format hood space and gloveboxes
Swept-source optical coherence tomography
Plasma cleaning
Colocated cell culture
Confocal microscopy

Meet Our Researchers

Problems that Advanced Materials & Manufacturing is Working to Solve

Reformulating coatings for circularity and uncertain supply chains
Designing bio-inspired surfaces for antifouling
Designing new separation processes for critical mineral recovery
Developing new approaches for molecular scale interrogation of corrosion
Accelerating new material discovery through novel automated synthetic approaches

Explore Advanced Materials & Manufacturing Collaborations

Advanced Materials & Manufacturing News

Built for Impact

October 26, 2026

Researchers are coming together under one roof with interdisciplinary expertise and advanced tools to act on pressing problems and benefit society
From ideas to breakthroughs: Explore the shared instruments and collaboration spaces in CWRU's new Roger E. Susi Interdisciplinary Research Building

October 20, 2026

This is the final story in a nine-part series introducing the research, people and building that will define Case Western Reserve’s next chapter of discovery. Explore the full series to learn about the seven research clusters and the resources that make the work possible.Editor's note: This story…
Forged for impact: Inside the Susi Building's Advanced Materials & Manufacturing research cluster

October 05, 2026

Case Western Reserve researchers are rethinking the materials behind everyday life—and the new Roger E. Susi Interdisciplinary Research Building is giving them the space to do it together.

Contact Us

To learn more about Advanced Materials & Manufacturing, contact cluster faculty lead Chris Wirth or meet the team of researchers.