Physical Chemistry Seminar: Dr. Rigoberto Hernandez, Johns Hopkins University
Credit: Peter Cutts
About the Seminar
3D-Networked Nanoparticles for Autonomous Computing
Over the last decade, it has become clear that conventional VLSI is reaching key scaling limits. Moreover, the energy efficiency of human-engineered electronic devices is many orders of magnitude lower as compared to biological computational structures. Such inefficiencies, for example, severely limit our ability to move from 2D to 3D architectures in materials systems as is needed to achieve high performance and span the complexity required for applications using big data or artificial intelligence. We therefore need a new class of materials that can enable computing but which are not bound by the rules of conventional VLSI, and we are inspired by the fact that the brain is an existence proof for such low-energy high-computing materials that do not rely on a von Neumann architecture. We have pursued the use of polymer-networked nanoparticles as a possible alternative. We will summarize our progress on characterizing these materials, and report the primitive structures that we have created computationally thus far.
About the Speaker
Dr. Rigoberto Hernandez is the Gompf Family Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University since 2016, and the Director of the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity (OXIDE). He is also a Professor in the Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He was born in Havana, Cuba and is a U.S. Citizen by birthright. He holds a B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering and Mathematics from Princeton University (1989), and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley (1993). He has published over 165 articles in theoretical and computational chemistry and discipline-based diversity research in chemistry.
Dr. Hernandez is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award (1997), Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award (1999), the Alfred P. Sloan Fellow Award (2000), a Humboldt Research Fellowship (2006-07), the ACS Award for Encouraging Disadvantaged Students into Careers in the Chemical Sciences (2014), the CCR Diversity Award (2015), the RCSA Transformative Research and Exceptional Education (TREE) Award (2016), the Herty Medal (2017), the Stanley C. Israel Regional Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences (2018), and the RCSA IMPACT Award (2020). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2004), the American Chemical Society (ACS, 2010), the American Physical Society (APS, 2011), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC, 2020). He was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar in 2015-2016. He previously served as the District IV Director on the ACS Board of Directors (2014-2019).
Host: Grant Rotskoff