The Active Materials Laboratory was started by Professor Greg P. Carman when he joined the faculty at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1992. There are currently a number of graduate students and undergraduate students working on various projects related to the field of active materials. The research areas studied in the lab include multiferroic materials, magnetostrictive materials, piezoelectric materials, fiber optic sensors, and shape memory alloys. A major focus of the research is to understand the response of field coupled material behavior with unique experimental equipment and apply this understanding to developing analytical models for predicting the response of coupled material systems.

The research group receives funding from a variety of sources. The present cornerstone for the group is the TANMS NSF Nanoscale Engineering Research Center potentially funded over 10 years with $38 million, in which Prof. Carman acts as Director. AML also currently has funding from other government sources, including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In addition to government agencies, the group interacts and receives funding/interactions from industrial organizations, such as Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, GM, HRL, Maritime Applied Physics, and Nextgen. The group has ongoing collaborations with a wide range of researchers at Brookhaven National Lab, LLNL, Paul Scherrer Institute, Johannes Guttenburg Institute, and Hong Kong Polytechnic.

Active Materials applications include, but are not restricted to, the following areas/industries:

Advanced studies are, in large part, facilitated by AML's industrial partners as a result of close interaction and relationship developed between the industry and our researchers, and through funding by a number of governmental organizations.