SRG History

The Steel Research Group (SRG) was founded in 1985 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by its director, Prof. Greg Olson. In 1988 the SRG followed Prof. Olson and moved its headquarters to Northwestern University (NU) in Evanston, IL. While at NU, the SRG fulfilled numereous contracts for various government agencies and developed computational materials design technologies to enable a new generation of cybersteels. Through sponsored research programs such as the DARPA D3D project and the DARPA AIM project, the SRG partnered with other universities as part of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD) and several small businesses, chief among them being Questek Innovations LLC, to fully integrate the design and qualification of these new alloys into a computational framework. With the return of Prof. Olson to MIT in 2020, the SRG has returned to its original home and joins the MIT Materials Research Laboratory (MRL). The SRG continues to fulfill its goal of developing high performance steels for mission critical applications. To aide that goal, the SRG, now composed of eight MIT professors and their research teams, has recieved a five-year $7.2 million grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to further develop a new class of high-strength, high-toughness steels for hull applications.

SRG Accomplishments

2014 – Prof. Olson, among other scientists was invited to the whitehouse for the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) annual review. The MGI was launched in 2011 with the goal of greatly accelerating the typical 20-year materials cycle. In collaboration with other groups, the SRG demonstrated that leading corporations applying our technology have compressed the cycle to under 2 years.

Prof. Olson at the MGI-5 review.