School of Engineering
Showing 181-190 of 270 Results
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William Nix
Lee Otterson Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
BioI have been engaged in the study of mechanical properties of materials for nearly 50 years. My early work was on high temperature creep and fracture of metals, focusing on techniques for measuring internal back stresses in deforming metals and featuring the modeling of diffusional deformation and cavity growth processes. My students and I also studied high temperature dispersion strengthening mechanisms and described the effects of threshold stresses on these creep processes. Since the mid-1980's we have focused most of our attention on the mechanical properties of thin film materials used in microprocessors and related devices. We have developed many of the techniques that are now used to study of thin film mechanical properties, including nanoindentation, substrate curvature methods, bulge testing methods and the mechanical testing of micromachined (MEMS) structures. We are also known for our work on the mechanisms of strain relaxation in heteroepitaxial thin films and plastic deformation of thin metal films on substrates. In addition we have engaged in research on the growth, characterization and modeling of thin film microstructures, especially as they relate to the development of intrinsic stresses. Some of our recent work dealt with the mechanical properties of nanostructures and with strain gradients and size effects on the mechanical properties of crystalline materials. Our most recent work deals with the mechanical properties of lithiated nanostructures that are being considered for lithium-ion battery applications.
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Colin Ophus
Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Center Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioColin Ophus is an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and the L&S Family Center Fellow in Energy and Sustainability at the Precourt Institute for Energy. He previously worked as a Staff Scientist at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), part of the Molecular Foundry, at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He was awarded a US Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career award in 2018, and the Burton medal from the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) in 2018. His research focuses on experimental methods, reconstruction algorithms, and software codes for simulation, analysis, and instrument design of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning TEM (STEM).
Colin advocates for open science and his group has developed open-source scientific software including as the quantitative electron microscopy (quantEM) analysis code, the Prismatic STEM simulation code and the py4DSTEM analysis toolkit. He has taught many workshops around the world on topics ranging from scientific visualization to large scale data analysis. He also is the founder and editor-in-chief for a new journal based on interactive science communication named Elemental Microscopy. -
Punnag Padhy
Postdoctoral Scholar, Materials Science and Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrently, I am working on an on-chip platform to simultaneously trap and manipulate micron scale beads and droplets with an intention to implement chemical reactions on a chip at ultrasmall volumes.
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Marshall Scott Padilla
Acting Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
BioMarshall Scott Padilla will begin as an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a Sarafan ChEM-H Institute Scholar at Stanford in September 2026 pending University approval. His research takes a rational-design approach to RNA medicine, engineering lipids and lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that deliver RNA and proteins to specific cells. Rather than relying on empirical, large-scale screening, he couples the synthesis of structurally defined lipid libraries with multimodal biophysical characterization and in vivo screening to extract the structure–activity relationships that govern delivery.
His research group aims to move beyond the field's default of hepatic delivery toward LNPs that direct RNA and protein cargoes to defined cell types, enabling durable and precise therapies. Group interests span ionizable lipid synthesis, gene editing, cancer immunotherapy, ionic liquids, mapping endosomal escape, and the analytical and biophysical methods needed to relate nanoparticle structure to function. He is broadly interested in establishing generalizable chemical and structural principles for the next generation of delivery vehicles.
Prior to joining Stanford, Marshall was an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania with Prof. Michael J. Mitchell, where he developed the Branched ENdosomal Disruptor (BEND) lipid architecture for mRNA and CRISPR-Cas9 delivery (Nature Communications, 2025), advanced solution-based biophysical methods for characterizing LNP structure (Nature Biotechnology, 2025), and engineered LNPs co-delivering mRNA and small-molecule drugs for oral cancer chemoimmunotherapy (Advanced Materials, accepted). He completed his PhD in Chemistry (Chemical Biology) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his B.S. in Chemistry at the College of William & Mary. His work has been recognized by the Society for Biomaterials (Burroughs Wellcome Fund BioInterfaces Rising Star Award), the American Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (Hatton Award, postdoctoral first place), and an NIH/NIDCR T90 fellowship.
