Noah Malmstadt
Few people understand the culture of USC Viterbi‘s Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science better than Noah Malmstadt. He’s been part of the department for nearly two decades – and he believes it’s the faculty and student culture, as much as the global stakes of the research, that makes USC Mork an optimal environment for catalysis and change.
Now, in his new role as chair, Malmstadt is leading a department that combines three distinct fields: chemical engineering, materials science and petroleum engineering. That structure, he believes, has become increasingly relevant as questions of energy, manufacturing and the discovery of new materials are ever more intertwined.
Collaboration, as he sees it, is more important than consensus. What matters is that department decisions are informed by multiple perspectives and linked by shared priorities for engineering education.
We caught up with Malmstadt to hear his take on engineering pedagogy, the strong bonds that define the department’s culture, and how to strike a balance between making and machine learning.
Let’s start with the basics. What are those shared priorities for an engineering education?
Malmstadt: At USC Viterbi, we’re all pointing in the same direction when it comes to engineering education. Engineers need to be able to work across disciplines. They need to be fluent in emerging computational tools. And they need to be aware of real-world problems and capable of evaluating the kinds of challenges that engineers are uniquely equipped to solve.
What’s specific about USC Mork is that we “make stuff.” Let’s put it this way: chemical engineers, materials scientists and petroleum engineers are responsible for producing matter that exists in the world. What we make contributes to buildings, energy systems, consumer electronics, personal care products, food production… almost every element of our engineered material world.
Training students to recognize that ubiquity is important. From the moment they join the department, we want them to understand the scale of the impact they’ll have as engineers and the breadth of opportunities available to them.
That seems connected to one of the strengths of USC Mork’s graduates: they can enter a wide range of industries.
Malmstadt: Absolutely. Materials are needed everywhere. Materials scientists end up in aerospace, electronics, advanced manufacturing and many other industries. Chemical engineers can contribute to virtually any physical process that must be designed, controlled or optimized.
That’s one of the things I think people sometimes underestimate about these disciplines. Every industry, to some extent, relies on chemical engineering tools or materials science. So while people often associate the fields with a relatively narrow set of traditional industries, our graduates are increasingly moving into all sorts of sectors.
You’ve mentioned that USC Mork research aligns with “new ways to think about energy and new ways to think about manufacturing.” What do you mean by that?
Malmstadt: A lot of what we do is driven by the way chemical engineers and materials scientists think about data. Data shapes manufacturing processes, but it also shapes our decisions about what we need to make and why. It ties together the process, the materials and the motivations behind the work.
The department’s research spans materials for energy applications, chemical and material manufacturing methods, and data-driven ideas underlying both energy systems and manufacturing systems. Even researchers working on biological problems tend to approach those problems from a systems perspective and through data-driven methods. The applications may differ, but many of the underlying questions are surprisingly similar.
You have identified energy as a challenge that the department is particularly well equipped to address. Why?
Malmstadt: Energy touches nearly all of our research. You see it in sustainable manufacturing. You see it in the design of lightweight materials and photovoltaic materials. You see it in efforts to reduce energy consumption in electronics. And on the petroleum side, you see the same engineering tools being applied to geothermal electricity generation and carbon sequestration.
What’s changed is that we’re increasingly thinking less in terms of individual disciplines and more in terms of how those disciplines, taken together, can address fundamental questions of energy. That’s one reason we’ve developed the master’s program in Energy Engineering. We are trying to bring together expertise from across the department and provide students with the breadth of knowledge needed to address energy challenges from multiple angles.
Machine learning has been part of the department’s PhD curriculum for years. Why make it the first thing students encounter?
Malmstadt: For several years now, we’ve been teaching machine learning as a common first-semester course for our incoming PhD students. It gives students entering chemical engineering, materials science and petroleum engineering a shared experience right at the beginning of their doctoral studies, and equips them with an understanding of tools that are increasingly integrated throughout engineering research.
In my own research group, we use machine learning to interrogate the products we’re manufacturing in real time. Other computational researchers have pioneered the use of machine learning methods to design materials from first principles. It’s become deeply integrated into research across the department.
The challenge involves being able to speak the same language as computer scientists so that engineering knowledge informs the development of those tools. That’s why I think it’s important not to think about machine learning as something external to the engineering of matter. Our research benefits from advances in machine learning, but our engineering problems also help drive the development of new computational approaches.
You’ve often emphasized the department’s interdisciplinary culture. What does that look like in practice?
Malmstadt: Academics have been talking about interdisciplinarity for a long time, but I think the context has changed. We’re responding to changing public-sector priorities, changing funding priorities and increasingly complex engineering challenges. The problems students need to engage with don’t arrive neatly packaged within a single discipline. They might be pursuing a degree in chemical engineering, materials science or petroleum engineering, but they’re often working alongside people from the other disciplines every day.
As a result, our students typically identify with the department as a whole, rather than separate groups attached to different programs. The same goes for our approach to hiring new faculty. We want to work with researchers who are true experts in their own discipline, but who also have meaningful interfaces with other areas of expertise.
Looking ahead, what areas of research are you personally most excited about?
Malmstadt: One area that particularly interests me is autonomous experimentation. The idea is to combine experimental expertise and computational expertise in a way that allows large numbers of experiments to be performed rapidly and their results synthesized automatically. The dynamism is the result of a feedback loop: the experiments inform the computational tools, and the computational tools help direct the experiments.
Autonomous experimentation is also a very “USC Mork challenge” because it brings together strengths that already exist within the department. We have outstanding experimental researchers and computational researchers. The opportunity is to build new ways of thinking about experimentation itself. That’s the sort of convergence I find exciting: when different areas of expertise come together and catalyze capabilities that wouldn’t exist in isolation.
Published on July 1st, 2026
Last updated on July 1st, 2026