You cannot win a NASCAR race without understanding science.1 Materials play important roles in improving performance, but also in ensuring safety. On the performance side, NASCAR limits the materials race car scientists and engineers can use to limit ownership costs. ‘Exotic metals’ are not allowed, so controlling microstructure and nanostructure are important tools in producing materials that maximize strength while minimizing weight. Compacted Graphite Iron, a cast iron in which magnesium additions produce interlocking microscale graphite reinforcements, makes engine blocks stronger and lighter. NASCAR’s new car design employs an innovative polymer composite called TegrisTM in the splitter. This composite can replace significantly more expensive carbon-fiber composites in many applications.The most important role of materials in racing is safety. Drivers wear firesuits made of polymers that carbonize (providing thermal protection) and expand (reducing oxygen availability) when heated. Catalytic materials originally developed for space-based CO2 lasers filter air for drivers during races. Although materials help cars go fast, they also help cars slow down safely—important because the kinetic energy of a race car going 180 mph is nine times greater than that of a passenger car going 60 mph. Energy-absorbing foams in the cars and on the tracks direct energy dissipation away from the driver during accidents.NASCAR fans–and there are about 75 million of them–understand that science and engineering are integral to keeping their drivers safe and helping their teams win. Their passion for racing gives us a great opportunity to share our passion for materials science and engineering with them.1. Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, The Physics of NASCAR (Dutton, New York City, 2008).NASCAR® is a registered trademark of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc.TegrisTM is a trademark of Milliken & Company.Bio:Diandra Leslie-Pelecky earned undergraduate degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of North Texas and a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Michigan State University. She joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1994, and moved to The University of Texas at Dallas as Professor of Physics in May 2008. Her research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, is in magnetic nanomaterials. Her group focuses on fundamental understanding of magnetic materials and application of those materials to medical diagnosis and treatment processes such as magnetic resonance imaging and chemotherapy.In addition to research, Professor Leslie-Pelecky is nationally recognized for her work in science education for K-12 schools, future science teachers, and the public. She has directed projects aimed at improving science education at all levels, supported primarily by the National Science Foundation. Those interests took an unexpected (left) turn when she wrote The Physics of NASCAR, which was excerpted by TIME magazine and has been featured in Sporting News and D magazines. She maintains a popular blog (www.stockcarscience.com/blog) and appears periodically on the Sirius Speedway satellite radio program to keep fans up-to-date about the scientific principles that come into play on the track and in the garage.

Conflict and war have historically driven the development of medical advances far in excess of and at a more accelerated pace than could ever occur during peacetime. This perverse outcome from warfare has, in many ways, benefited mankind historically. Since the development of early bandages and surgical techniques in ancient times to modern advances in combat casualty care including hemostatic dressings, antibiotics, blood transfusions, and hemodialysis, medical breakthroughs resulting from warfare have impacted modern medicine capabilities both on the battlefield, and through the translation to the civilian population, to healthcare in general. Modern warfare is continuing to accelerate research in wound healing, tissue repair, gene therapy, and drug development to improve survivability and combat multi-drug resistent pathogens. One key to accelerating current advances is capitalizing on materials science––through developments in biocompatible and bio-derived materials, in biomimetic materials, in regenerative medicine and nanoparticle and specialized delivery formulations that direct the role of and targeting of simple molecules for regulation of immune function, tissue regeneration, and growth. Exciting concepts in understanding the properties of hydrogel-like extra-cellular matrices and biomimetic concepts are leading to advances in true regenerative medicine which include enhanced ability to stimulate, regulate and modulate immune function in injury and trauma as well as improve to the body’s ability to withstand potentially lethal insults from infectious agents, enhance immune function and improve the response time to injury and reduce the amount of scarring following injury. The design of new biomaterials that improve the interface between living tissue and artificial tissues and can deliver not only new drugs and genes but also influence the three-dimensional relationship of cells, tissues and structures to regenerative growth of lost tissue including neurotissues, spinal cord and bone tissue provides the research foundation for new structures, materials, and therapies that have the potential to tremendously impact modern medicine. This talk will provide a highlight of previous medical contributions stemming from the battlefield as well as some still-unsolved challenges and exciting opportunities currently under investigation.Bio:William P. Wiesmann, M.D., is founder, president and CEO of the BioSTAR Group, a collective of companies specializing in lifesaving advances in equipment and technologies. He is also president and CEO of Hawaii Chitopure Inc., a company developing new anti-microbial materials that destroy drug resistant bacteria; president and medical director of AutoMedx, Inc., a medical device company; CEO of BioSTAR West, a biotechnology research and development company; and co-founder of HemCon Medical Technologies. In addition, he is the senior consultant for advanced technology at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology at Massachusetts General Hospital; senior consultant and principal investigator for the U.S. Military Space Test Program; principal investigator, advanced life support systems, for the U.S. Army and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and senior medical advisor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Revolutionizing Prosthetics Program. Dr. Wiesmann graduated cum laude with a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Cincinnati in 1968, before achieving his medical degree from the Washington University School of Medicine in 1972. Following internship and residency at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, he completed fellowships in medicine, nephrology and medical research at Washington University and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. In 1978, he became a medical researcher for the U.S. Army at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C., rising to research director for combat casualty at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Ft. Detrick, MD when he retired in 1998. He holds more than 30 awarded or pending patents. He has directed major programs for NASA and for the Department of Defense. He serves as a member of the Board of Trustees for Harvey Mudd College, is a member of the external advisory board for the UC Department of Biomedical Engineering, the National Council of the Washington University School of Medicine and the Board of Councilors for the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. In June of 2008, Wiesmann received an Honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Cincinnati for his lifetime achievements in medical research and multiple inventions that have improved medical care in trauma and emergency medicine.

Such big problems as oil dependence, climate change, and nuclear proliferation are artifacts of not using energy in a way that saves money. These and many other problems can be solved not at a cost but at a profit by intelligent application of modern technology and integrative design in mindful markets. Advanced materials and manufacturing technologies are especially important in renewable energy capture, energy conversion and storage, and above all energy efficiency: for example, ultralight structural materials for automotive and other application are the most important single element in getting the U.S. completely off oil by the 2040s, led by business for profit.Bio:Amory Lovins, a MacArthur Fellow and consultant physicist, is among the world’s leading innovators in energy and its links with resources, security, development, and environment. He has advised the energy and other industries for more than three decades as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. His work in 50+ countries has been recognized by the “Alternative Nobel,” Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, Goff Smith, and Mitchell Prizes, the Benjamin Franklin and Happold Medals, ten honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, Foreign Membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, honorary Senior Fellowship of the Design Futures Council, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Jean Meyer, Time Hero for the Planet, Time International Hero of the Environment, Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership, and World Technology Awards. A Harvard and Oxford dropout and former Oxford don, he advises major firms and governments worldwide and has briefed 19 heads of state. Mr. Lovins cofounded and is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org), an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan think-and-do tank that creates abundance by design. Much of its pathfinding work on advanced resource productivity (typically with expanding returns to investment) and innovative business strategies is synthesized in Natural Capitalism (1999, with Paul Hawken and L.H. Lovins, www.natcap.org). This intellectual capital provides most of RMI’s revenue through private-sector consultancy that has served or been invited by more than 80 Fortune 500 firms, lately redesigning more than $30 billion worth of facilities in 29 sectors. In 1992, RMI spun off E SOURCE (www.esource.com), and in 1999, Fiberforge Corporation (www.fiberforge.com), a composites engineering firm that Mr. Lovins chaired until 2007; its technology, when matured and scaled, will permit cost-effective manufacturing of the ultralight-hybrid Hypercar® vehicles he invented in 1991. The latest of his 29 books are Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size (2002, www.smallisprofitable.org), an Economist book of the year blending financial economics with electrical engineering, and the Pentagon-cosponsored Winning the Oil Endgame (2004, www.oilendgame.com), a roadmap for eliminating U.S. oil use by the 2040s, led by business for profit. His most recent visiting academic chair was in spring 2007 as MAP/Ming Professor in Stanford’s School of Engineering, offering the University’s first course on advanced energy efficiency (www.rmi.org/stanford).

A brief discussion is given of several new topics in ferroelectricity: First, we show that arrays of lead zirconate-titanate (PZT) nanotubes give intense THz emission from 2-8 THz, offering some advantages over semiconductors such as p-InAs [Scott, Banys et al., Nano Lett. (2008 in press)], including the possibility of electrically driven (non-optical) devices. Second, we demonstrate new effects in switching of nano-domains, including vortex ``doughnut" domains and faceting of circular domains [Gruverman et al, J. Phys. Cond. Mat. 20, 342201 (2008); Scott et al., J. Phys. Cond. Mat. (2008 in press); Lahoche et al., Integ. Ferroelec. 99, 60 (2008)]. Third, we examine true finite-size effects in free-standing crystals of ca. 50 micron thickness, making it clear that differences between crystals and ceramic films of such thickness are extrinsic and not due to depolarization fields [Saad, Schilling et al., Integ. Ferroelec. 61, 239 (2004); 92, 53 (2007)]. Finally, we reexamine magnetoelectricity in multiferroics and show that ferroelectrically induced ferromagnetism is possible in antiferromagnets [Fox and Scott, J. Phys. C: Sol. St. Phys. 10, L329 (1977)] but not paramagnets, and that, following Fox et al., the essential term in the free energy is always trilinear, of form PMjLk, where P is polarization, L, sublattice magnetization, and M, weak ferromagnetization [Fox et al., Phys. Rev. B21, 2926 (1980); J. M. Perez-Mato, ESME, Girona (Sept. 2008)]. Bio:James Scott was born in Beverly, NJ in 1942 as the middle child of three in a working class family. Neither his parents nor grandparents went through high school, let alone university. His father was orphaned at an early age and went to work in a coal mine at age 13; his mother, the youngest of 10 children, was blinded in an automobile accident at about the same age. He attended the public high school in Burlington, NJ and was interested in science, including ham radio (K2PPV).At 17 he received a scholarship to Harvard where he majored in physics. After Cambridge he ventured west to Ohio State. He completed his Ph.D. at age 23 under the supervision of Prof. K. Narahari Rao, a man he greatly admired. The thesis was on experimental optics – timely with the concurrent invention of lasers. Immediately afterwards he joined Bell Labs at Murray Hill, working for Sergio Porto on laser Raman spectroscopy of crystals. Over the next six years he emphasized studies of phase transitions and in this way drifted into ferroelectrics. All of his solid-state physics was self-taught (his Ph.D. thesis was in the molecular spectroscopy of acetylene). He benefited greatly by working with Paul Fleury, John Worlock, and Rogerio Leite.At age 29 he was appointed full professor of physics at the University of Colorado, where he remained for more than 20 years. His first postdoc there was John Ryan, now professor of physics at Oxford. While at Colorado he met his wife, Galya, in the office of Pyotr Kapitza in Moscow. They were married in Moscow in 1982 at the peak of the Cold War. Scott's venture into thin films and ferroelectric memories came about through Galya, who was asked to translate a text on ferroelectric thin films by Tomashpolskii for Ramtron Corp. This brought Scott into Ramtron (eventually as Director of the Technical Board) and to close work with Carlos Araujo and Larry McMillan, with whom he later formed Symetrix Corp. The PZT work at Ramtron was done by Scott and others, notably S. Eaton, who was in large part responsible for the ``PUND" method of measuring hysteresis without charge injection artifacts [Scott J F et al., Switching Kinetics of Lead Zirconate Titanate Submicron Thin-Film Memories, JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS 64: 787-792 (1988)].During his 21 years in Boulder, CO, Scott was awarded both the prize for best classroom teacher (a secret ballot of the students) and the university research award as best researcher (an extra sabbatical, spent in Paris).In 1991 Scott moved to Australia as Dean of Science, first at RMIT (Melbourne) and later at the University of New South Wales (UNSW, Sydney). Although busy as a dean, he continued to publish papers in Nature and other high-impact journals and in 1997 received both a Humboldt Prize from Germany and appointment as the SONY Corporation Chair of Science in Yokohama, where he continued his work on FRAMs (ferroelectric memories).In 1999 he was appointed by invitation Research Professor of Ferroics at Cambridge University, a post he still holds. He received the Monkasho Award from Japan in 2001 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008. He has published more than 400 papers, of which ``Ferroelectric Memories" (Science 1989) has 2400 citations.

This year marks a major materials milestone in the makeup of silicon-based field-effect transistors: the SiO₂ gate dielectric is being replaced by a hafnium-based dielectric in microprocessors produced by leading manufacturers. The incredible electronic properties of the SiO₂/silicon interface are the reason that silicon has dominated the semiconductor industry and helped it grow to over $250 billion in annual sales. The shrinkage of transistor dimensions (Moore’s law) has led to tremendous improvements in circuit speed and computer performance. At the same time, however, it has also led to exponential growth in the static power consumption of transistors due to quantum mechanical tunneling through an ever-thinner SiO₂ gate dielectric. This spurred an intensive effort to find an alternative to SiO₂ with a higher dielectric constant (K) to temper this exploding power consumption and enable Moore’s law to continue. In this talk the comprehensive materials analysis to identify silicon-compatible materials that go beyond SiO₂ (i.e., with higher K and sufficient bandgap) will be described,(1,3) together with how these materials have enabled improvements in MOSFETs, DRAM, and emerging semiconductor devices.(4)1. K.J. Hubbard and D.G. Schlom, J. Mater. Res. 11 (1996) 2757-2776.2. C.A. Billman, P.H. Tan, K.J. Hubbard, and D.G. Schlom in Ultrathin SiO2 and High-K Materials for ULSI Gate Dielectrics, edited by H.R. Huff, C.A. Richter, M.L. Green, G. Lucovsky, and T. Hattori, Vol. 567 (Materials Research Society, Warrendale, 1999), pp. 409-414.3. D.G. Schlom and J.H. Haeni, MRS Bull. 27 (2002) 198-204.4. D.G. Schlom, S. Guha, and S. Datta, MRS Bull. 33 (November 2008 issue).Bio:Darrell Schlom is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. After receiving a B.S. degree from Caltech, he did graduate work at Stanford University receiving an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. He was then a post-doc 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 Mueller. In 1992 he joined the faculty at Penn State in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he spent 16 years before joining the faculty at Cornell earlier this year. His research interests involve the replacement of SiO₂ as the gate dielectric in MOSFETs and the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of oxide thin films, especially those with functional properties (ferroelectric, piezoelectric, ferromagnetic, or a combination of these properties), including their epitaxial integration with semiconductors. His group synthesizes these oxide heterostructures using molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). He has published over 300 papers and has 7 patents. He was awarded a Semiconductor Research Corporation Fellowship for his graduate studies at Stanford, the Ross N. Tucker AIME Electronics Materials Award in 1989, an IBM Invention Achievement Award in 1991, an ONR Young Investigator Award in 1993, the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 1999 for his sabbatical stay in Jochen Mannhart’s group at the University of Augsburg, the American Association for Crystal Growth Young Author Award in 1999, the ASM International Bradley Stoughton Award for Young Teachers in 1999, a Semiconductor Research Corporation Inventor Recognition Award in 2004, and the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in Engineering in 2006. He was also selected for the Defense Science Study Group for 2004-2006, elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003, served on the MRS Board of Directors from 2005-2007, and was named Distinguished Professor by Penn State in 2007.This year marks a materials revolution in computers: after over 40 years, the SiO₂ gate dielectric of Si-based transistors is being replaced by a material with a much higher dielectric constant (K), HfO₂. The materials science basis for this revolution now hitting the market was laid over a decade ago by Schlom’s group when they suggested the thermodynamic stability of HfO₂ in contact with silicon (K.J. Hubbard and D.G. Schlom, “Thermodynamic Stability of Binary Oxides in Contact with Silicon,” Journal of Materials Research 11 (1996) 2757-2776). This publication has become the fifth most highly cited paper in the Journal of Materials Research and demonstrates the power of thermodynamics in drastically reducing the number of high K candidates suitable for this application, i.e., only those that are stable in contact with silicon. A comparison of the materials listed as being appropriate in the 1997 National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors vs. the 1999 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors makes the impact of this work clear. In 1997 the high K materials listed are (Ba,Sr)TiO3, Ta₂O₅, and TiO₂. All of these materials react with silicon (as Schlom’s thermodynamic analysis published in 1996 predicted) and extensive research by semiconductor companies around the world revealed the futility of this approach. These materials were then abandoned in favor of the materials suggested by Schlom’s thermodynamic analysis. The Si-compatible materials with high K and high bandgap that Schlom’s group identified are being used as gate dielectrics in MOSFETs, dielectric layers in DRAMs, and also as buffer layers when integrating functional oxides (that would react if directly integrated) with silicon. In late 2007 Intel began shipping their new Penryn line of processors in which the SiO₂ gate insulator of the transistors is replaced by an HfO2 dielectric with higher K. IBM and AMD have both announced that they will also use HfO₂ to replace SiO₂ in their highest performance CPUs. This materials revolution saves power at the same time that it boosts speed. With continued scaling to higher integration densities, DRAMs also need to avoid low-K reaction layers between silicon electrodes and the high-K dielectric layer used in DRAM trench capacitors. The materials being turned to by the semiconductor industry are again the same set that Schlom’s thermodynamic analysis indicated are stable in contact with silicon.