A UNT research team received a $1 million grant from the Department of Defense, under the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, to study how metal alloys function at the atomic level. The team consists of three experts from UNT's College of Engineering: Principal investigator and associate professor Srinivasan Srivilliputhur and co-PIs Raj Banerjee, a Presidential and Regents professor, and University Distinguished Research Professor Michael Baskes, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

Srivilliputhur, Banerjee and Baskes hope to give scientists better insight on how certain metal alloys used by the military and aerospace industries deform under stress. While engineers take stress factors into account when determining the tolerances of a material, their methods of finding the breaking point often take place at the macro level.