Live Webcast: A Material World

In his public lecture at Perimeter Institute on April 4th, Rob Moore will explore how the next great “age” of humankind may well be forged in a new quantum world of materials.

From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, nothing has had a more profound influence on the world than our understanding of the materials around us. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century and the Information Revolution of the 20th were fueled by humankind’s ability to understand, harness, and control materials. 

Our ongoing quest to find and develop new kinds of materials, in hopes of tackling some of society’s most challenging energy problems, requires us to learn how to build materials from the atom up. Doing so means combining state-of-the-art technologies (such as growing thin-film materials) with cutting-edge techniques for probing the electron structure. Relatively recent advances in these fields have given researchers unprecedented understanding and insight into creating new materials with exotic and useful properties. 

About Rob Moore: Rob Moore is Assistant Director of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences. He received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Tennessee Technological University in 1994, after which he spent five years in the US Navy as a submarine officer aboard the USS Alaska (SSBN 732). He received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2002 and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2006.