The research group Sustainable Materials Science (SMS) was started by prof. Verbeken when he became research professor (BOF-ZAP) at Ghent University in 2010. His group has steadily grown of the years. In 2018, Kim Verbeken became full professor at Ghent University and since October 2019, the academic staff was expanded with two part-time assistant professors: Inge Bellemans and Tom Depover. Both of them are also FWO postdoctoral fellows. The research group is part of the Department of Materials, Textiles and Chemical Engineering (MaTCh) and has a large amount of experimental and characterization facilities at its disposal for both research and service purposes.

The research and provided services focus on three topics:

• the study of the interaction of materials with hydrogen
• the study of degradation of materials by interaction with their environment
• the study of high-temperature metallurgical processes from both a modelling and experimental approach

The research group is involved in several European projects.