Aaron Lindenberg | Faculty Spotlight

Aaron Lindenberg

Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Photon Science

"My groups research efforts are focused on taking atomic-scale movies of materials and devices in motion and in-situ. We take real-time snapshots of the motion of atoms and electrons and use this to try to understand materials and device functionality and to engineer and manipulate them."

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Pennsylvania but mostly grew up in a small town outside of Boston. I actually wasn't truly interested in science until around my sophomore or junior year in high school. A turning point for me was when a physics teacher assigned a project to build a perpetual motion machine. Although I vaguely understood that this violated fundamental laws of thermodynamics, this did not deter me. I still vividly recall a few friends and I working all night in the garage, building a contraption involving rotating jugs of water which were timed to release their contents at just the right times to enable a net rotation. Of course it failed, but I took away from this a sense of the power of science, the creativity it involved, and the fun of working on challenging experiments and brainstorming with others late into the night (something I still enjoy!)

Where did you study?

I attended Columbia University for my undergraduate degree and majored in Physics. Then I moved to UC Berkeley for my Ph.D. where I started working on experiments at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory using the Advanced Light Source, a powerful synchrotron which produces bright x-rays for characterizing materials at the atomic scale. Many of the ideas from those early days still motivate my research to this day.

What led you to Stanford?

Soon after my Ph.D. I started working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, just up the road from Stanford campus, as a staff scientist. Already in the works was the planned construction of the world's first x-ray laser and this was really what led me to Stanford. There I was able to carry out some of the very first efforts to probe how materials transform on femtosecond time-scales (1 femtosecond = 1 millionth of a billionth of a second) as part of big team. There was some similarity in these early efforts to my above-mentioned perpetual motion machine days and it often seemed like nature did not want us to succeed (luckily we did not in the end require any violation of thermodynamic principles). I joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department in 2007 as an assistant professor.

Please describe any of your current research you would like highlighted and describe its importance, and/or any research you hope to accomplish in the future.

My groups research efforts are focused on taking atomic-scale movies of materials and devices in motion and in-situ. We take real-time snapshots of the motion of atoms and electrons and use this to try to understand materials and device functionality and to engineer and manipulate them. Perhaps surprisingly, dynamical processes at the atomic and nanoscale often play a key role in determining the performance of devices with applications to energy conversion, energy storage, and information processing.

What advice do you have for aspiring scientist researchers in the field?

I think it's important to try to find enjoyment in what you do, and to see the challenges you face as a scientist as part of what makes the whole process worthwhile, part of a collaborative endeavor. I also think finding ways to always teach yourself new things, sometimes only vanishingly related to your specific research, is of central importance.