From Invisible to $1,000,000,000 in Capitalization

Metamaterials first made headlines in 2006 with Duke Engineering’s invention of the world’s first invisibility cloak. Discover how Duke’s expertise in manipulating electromagnetic waves has spawned a dozen startups that have raised over a billion dollars in funding.

Dear Colleagues,

Duke ECE has been at the forefront of electromagnetic wave manipulation through the use of metamaterials since our faculty co-invented them a quarter-century ago. Through a focused and collaborative effort with Duke’s Office of Translation and Commercialization, I’m proud to say that the technology that was once seen as a parlor trick is now the basis of a dozen startups backed by more than a billion dollars from one research lab alone.

Duke ECE has been long dedicated to transforming technologies from fundamental inquiries into products that make an impact on society, with metamaterials being just one example. This combination of research and translation is one of the many reasons that both our electrical engineering and computer engineering graduate programs were ranked in the top 20 by the US News and World Report.

Hai "Helen" Li
Chair and Clare Boothe Luce Professor

Top 20 Graduate Programs

in electrical engineering and computer engineering (U.S. News)

Meta Marketplace

Want to know where metamaterials are making a real-world difference? Look no further than the Ukrainian drones that have opened up the Black Sea.

Beyond Materials

Not sure what a metamaterial is? Get the full behind-the-scenes story of how this “weird science” came to be from the first rejected manuscript to a widespread commercial success.

David Smith

Co-inventor of metamaterials and serial entrepreneur, Smith and his lab has spun out more than a half-dozen companies since 2012 with another half-dozen in the works.

Steve Cummer

Cummer’s work focuses mostly on acoustic metamaterials that can create sound holograms, filter out background noise and hide objects from sonar. He’s a leading expert on lightning, too.

Natalia Litchinitser

The most recent addition to the metamaterials group, Litchinitser’s work uses nanoscale fabrication to twist light for higher optical bandwidth and bend it around corners as a waveguide.

Maiken Mikkelsen

Mikkelsen is the leader of a Department of Defense MURI award aiming to use plasmonics to capture every bit of information carried by light across the entire spectrum in a single snapshot.

Willie Padilla

With a historical focus on the terahertz realm, Padilla has more recently been harnessing the powers of machine learning to make metamaterial design more efficient.

“I don’t think there’s really any place that has as much work associated with metamaterials as Duke. Certainly on the commercialization side. This is a singularity in that space.”

—DAVID SMITH

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