Van Vliet (born June 21, 1976) is an American engineer, currently the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Van Vliet received her Sc.B.
degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Brown University in 1998, and her Ph.D.
in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 2002.
She became a faculty member at MIT in 2004. While an undergraduate at Brown, she suffered grave head injuries in a car accident, and fought successfully to regain her memory, judgment, speech and other communication skills.