The Cornell University Board of Trustees have elected Darrell G. Schlom to be the Tisch University Professor, effective April 1, 2023. Endowed chairs are the highest faculty honor at Cornell.
Schlom received his B.S. degree from the California Institute of Technology, and completed an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at Stanford University. He did postdoctoral work at IBM's research lab in Zurich, Switzerland in the oxide superconductors and novel materials group managed by Nobel Prize winners J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. He served on the faculty at Penn State for 16 years before joining Cornell Engineering in 2008.
His research interests involve the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of oxide thin films by reactive molecular-beam epitaxy, especially utilizing a 'materials-by-design' approach to the discovery of materials with properties superior to any known. His group synthesizes these oxide heterostructures using molecular-beam epitaxy.
Schlom has dedicated much of his career to discovering new materials that possess properties of great value to the electronics industry. He has published more than 700 papers and 12 patents resulting in an h-index of 94 and over 46,000 citations. His work has been recognized by the highest awards for materials discovery by four relevant societies: the MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society, the Frank Prize from the International Organization for Crystal Growth, the McGroddy Prize from the American Physical Society, and the John A. Thornton Memorial Award/Lecture from the American Vacuum Society. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the American Vacuum Society, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering. When they elected him to their ranks, the NAE praised Schlom’s “materials-by-design” approach, in which he works closely with experts in theory, synthesis and characterization to discover materials with properties superior to those in existence.
Schlom is a founder and co-director of PARADIM — the Platform for the Accelerated Realization, Analysis and Discovery of Interface Material — which enables scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs nationwide to design and create new inorganic materials for use in electronics. PARADIM was launched in 2016 with the support of a $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation. In 2021, it received a second NSF award of $22.5 million to fund another five years, confirming that Schlom and his collaborators had — in the words of Lynden Archer, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering at Cornell — “defined a world-class model for creating novel materials by design.”
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