Geoff Brennecka named department head for Metallurgical and Materials Engineering

Geoff Brennecka has been named department head for Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at Colorado School of Mines. 

A member of the Mines faculty since 2014, Brennecka is the George S. Ansell Chair of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. He previously served as a Ben Fryrear Endowed Chair for Innovation and Excellence from 2018 to 2021. His appointment as department head began July 1. 

“I’m excited to head this department, because we already work with a lot of people across campus and I think there are a lot more opportunities for cross-campus collaboration,” Brennecka said. “We need to continue to do what we’re good at and show everybody why our work matters – the Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Department has a really strong reputation within our field, but the nature of materials science in general is that it’s just not that well known, so we need to remind engineers across disciplines that all the materials they’re using are also engineered.”  

Collaboration comes naturally to the department, because, as Brennecka puts it, materials are important for all different kinds of engineering. 

“Materials really are everywhere. Everything that we use every day is made of materials of some sort, so there are always opportunities to improve the processing of those materials, from  the extraction of critical minerals all the way to integration into end products and every step in between,” he said.  

With a background in ceramics, Brennecka said promoting Mines’ three-year-old ceramic engineering degree program, alongside the well-known strengths in metallurgy, will also be a priority. 

“Over the last 40 years, ceramics and metals-focused programs got swallowed up into a very broad, surface-level material science that is taught at a lot of other universities,” Brennecka said. “One of the strengths of Mines is that we have the deep technical content and expertise in niche fields that a lot of other places either don’t value anymore or just completely forgot about. There are still a lot of needs across industry and in research, and we can fill in those gaps because we still have that expertise and are pushing the envelope in new areas.” 

Brennecka has been at Mines since 2014 and was promoted to full professor for the 2024-25 academic year. From 2019-2021, he was associate director of the Interdisciplinary Materials Science Graduate Program and he co-directed the Alliance for the Development of Additive Processing Technologies (ADAPT) from 2020-2025.   

Brennecka holds a PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in ceramic engineering from University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology). Before joining Mines, he was on staff at Sandia National Laboratories, working in the Electronic, Optical and Nanostructured Materials Department.