Q&As

Andrew J. Boydston is the Yamamoto Family Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a trained chemist he worked on catalysts for the synthesis of polymers during his postdoc time and started his independent career as an assistant professor of Chemistry in 2010 at the University of Washington. In 2014 he involved in a project with colleagues at the mechanical engineering department at the University of Washington which piqued his interest in additive manufacturing and which remained one of his research lines after moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018. He is interested in organocatalysts for polymerization reactions, mechanophores, polymers for controlled release and additive manufacturing.

Professor Peter D Lee is a materials scientist at the University College London. His group focuses on X-ray imaging and computational simulation of materials at a microstructural level for materials design and advanced manufacturing.

Professor Julia R Greer is a materials scientist at the California Institute of Technology. Her group focuses on designing, fabricating and characterising micro- and nano-architected materials using 3D lithography, nanofabrication, and additive manufacturing (AM) techniques for a multitude of applications ranging from biological devices to damage-tolerant fabrics.

Professor Marie Edmonds is a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in the role of magmatic volatiles in magma genesis, volcanic eruptions, and volatile geochemical cycling. Dr. Robert Hazen is a geologist at Carnegie Science and executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory. His latest research has focused on the co-evolution of the geospheres and biospheres, and mineral diversity and distribution. Marie and Robert apply their research to help understand the chemical and biological roles of carbon in Earth.

Dmitri Strukov (an electrical engineer, University of California at Santa Barbara), Giacomo Indiveri (an electrical engineer, University of Zurich), Julie Grollier (a material physicist, Unite Mixte de Physique CNRS) and Stefano Fusi (a neuroscientist, Columbia University) talked to Nature Communications about the opportunities and challenges in developing brain-inspired computing technologies, namely neuromorphic computing, and advocated effective collaborations crossing multidisciplinary research areas to support this emerging community.