Manufacturing Systems and Technology (MST)

The Manufacturing Systems and Technology (MST) degree programme is a comprehensive education and research effort that concentrates on enabling manufacturing systems and technologies for emerging industries in a global context. We define emerging industries as those based on new technologies that are just beginning to be considered for commercialization. Currently, this includes a host of new concepts in micro-and nano-technology such as molecular diagnosis, advanced drug screening, new ideas for photonic devices, micro-robots, nano-scale optical devices, and a multitude of potential products employing micro-and nano-scale fluidics. At the commercial manufacturing-level these industries will be characterized by micron-scale product dimensions, high value-added, extreme quality requirements, mass customization, time sensitive distribution and entirely new business structures. In the immediate time frame our research will focus on an emerging industry that is now at the point of large-scale commercialization, namely: microfluidic devices for chemical, biomedical and photonic applications. While specific in nature, we also believe that the manufacturing issues for this emerging industry will have manufacturing process, systems and business issues that are common with many others yet-to-emerge industries, such as fluidic devices computation, advanced drug delivery systems and advanced health maintenance systems. Our research themes focus on critical issues enabling high volume, low cost, high quality products in the emerging industries of micro- and nano-manufacturing.