In 1962 he was named the first director of the Materials Research Laboratory at Penn State. He edited the Proceedings of a 1968 Conference on the chemistry of silicon carbide. The next year a national colloquy was held on materials science in the United States for which Roy edited the Proceedings. In 1973 he edited the Proceedings of a conference on phase transitions and their applications.
In 1974 Roy and Olaf Müller published The Major Ternary Structural Families with Springer-Verlag, which described the principal crystal structures of ternary compounds. The book received two brief reviews in materials trade journals. A cement journal reviewer said it would be "Useful to the practicing materials researcher, whether in industry or university, as well as the non-specialist who needs to become informed about particular materials."
A chemist writing for mineral processing readers, described its depth:
:The structural descriptions are at times too brief but the chapters contain valuable information such as compositional structure field maps (radius A vs. radius B), figures of unit cells or the polyhedral arrangements in some common structures, phase diagrams (P vs. T , or P vs. ionic radius), structural relationships, and phase transition data.
By 1991 he was a spokesperson for the movement and his lecture "New Materials: Fountainhead for New Technologies and New Science" was published by National Academy Press. Roy presented the lecture to learned audiences in Washington, D.C.; Tokyo, Japan; New Delhi, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and London in 1991 and 92. He made the case for linking a technical need to investigative effort, which he terms "technology traction", noting that the method is productive and cost-effective in comparison to science conducted with other purposes.
Rustum Roy was referred to as "[o]ne of the legends of materials science" at the time of his death.
Roy was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1973.