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Julia Mundy, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has been named a 2024 Moore Inventor Fellow, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has announced.
The fellowship champions scientist-inventors who design “groundbreaking tools and technologies – creative people poised to make substantial strides in scientific discovery, environmental conservation, and patient care,” according to the foundation.
Mundy was selected as one of five aspiring inventors in the ninth cohort of Moore Inventor Fellows. Receiving a total of $825,000 over three years, Mundy will continue her work developing ultra-thin oscillators that could one day advance telecommunications and medical imaging.
An experimental physicist, Mundy leads a research group that designs novel quantum materials at atomic scales using molecular-beam epitaxy, a technique that allows layer-by-layer construction of exotic, metastable materials. Her group is particularly focused on exploring new phenomena in quantum materials for electronic applications.
Mundy’s team will construct ultra-thin materials to make high-frequency piezoelectric oscillators, which couple mechanical and electrical energy. While piezoelectrics are already widely used in things like ultra-stable clocks and telecommunications, making them even thinner could help scientists to increase their oscillation frequencies, allowing for new applications and performance. The Moore Foundation award will allow Mundy’s team to take the basic science of synthesizing ultra-thin oxide materials to the next level.
The Moore Inventor Fellows program was launched in 2016 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, a groundbreaking and culturally significant prediction about the exponential growth of computing power. The program continues to embody Gordon Moore’s enthusiasm for science and innovation, committing nearly $34 million by 2026 to support 50 fellows. Jarad Mason of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology was also a recent Moore inventor Fellow.
More information is available at moore.org/inventors.
