The State University of Mons was established in 1965, at the heart of an old industrial region of South Belgium. Since that time, the role of the University emerged as a source of new ideas for the region. The Department of Materials was founded in 1988, developing from the identification of various groups and their expertise in the materials science field. The goal of the Department of Materials is “to arrange and promote researches in this field. The Department will also work at improving education in Materials Science.” The Department will continue existing contacts and promote new contacts with regional, national, and international industries, and its experimental facilities are accessible to all interested researchers.

The members of the Department of Materials belong to the Faculties of Science and Medicine of the State University of Mons. They form an interdisciplinary group, including physicists, chemists and biologists—experimentalists and theoreticians.

Although some research activities involve more than one group, they can be arranged according to either the nature of materials (thin films, polymers, surfaces, quasi-one-dimensional conductors, bio-materials) or methods of preparation (laser irradiation, chemical vapor deposition, electron evaporation) and characterization (electron and x-ray diffraction, spectrophotometry, FTIR, micro-Raman, electrical conductivity, surface analytical techniques).