Stanford University
Showing 1,141-1,160 of 2,676 Results
-
Molly McFadden
Acting Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
BioMolly McFadden is an incoming assistant professor in the department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University (beginning January 2027). The McFadden research group works at the interface of materials science and synthetic chemistry, using strain-promoted reactions to enable both new syntheses and new applications of soft materials. Her research combines transition-metal catalysis, polymer synthesis, and holistic materials characterization to link a polymer's primary structure and its mechanical response.
Plastics are subject to mechanical forces at every stage of their lives, from synthesis and processing to their use lifetime and ultimately to their recycling. These forces are usually treated as a liability: both extrusion and strain during use break chains, degrading the material. The McFadden group instead treats strain as a strategic and synthetic tool. Force acts across every length scale, impacting everything from the bulk properties and integrity of a material down to the electronic structure of a single bond. Further, the electronic impact of elongational strain accessible in polymer backbones remains far less understood than the contracted angular strain in small cyclic molecules known to enable unique reactivity. Force-responsive molecular switches, or mechanophores, let a material report on the stress it experiences, both as tools to map how stress propagates through soft materials and as the basis for stimuli-responsive materials with applications from smart plastics to biomedical sensing and therapeutics. The group uses catalytic and molecular approaches to understand these forces, to prevent the damage they cause, and ultimately to harness their energy to drive productive reactions to discover and synthesize new materials.
Prior to joining Stanford, Prof. McFadden was a Kathryn A. Day Miller Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Prof. John Hartwig on selective transition-metal-catalyzed C–H functionalization of commodity polyolefins to yield more sustainable plastics. She received her B.S. in Biochemistry from Indiana University and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Caltech, where she worked with Prof. Maxwell Robb on the design of molecular mechanophores for force-responsive polymeric materials. -
Daniel McFarland
Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Sociology and of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe majority of my current research projects concern the sociology of science and research innovation. Here are some examples of projects we are pursuing:
1. the process of intellectual jurisdiction across fields and disciplines
2. the process of knowledge innovation and diffusion in science
3. the propagators of scientific careers and advance
4. the role of identity and diversity on the process of knowledge diffusion and career advance
5. the process of research translation across scientific fields and into practice
6. the formal properties and mechanisms of ideational change (network analysis, or holistic conceptions of scientific propositions and ideas)
7. developing methods for identifying the rediscovery of old ideas recast anew
8. investigating the process of scientific review
I am also heavily involved in research on social networks and social network theory development. Some of my work concerns relational dynamics and cognitive networks as represented in communication. This often concerns the communication of children (in their writings and speech in classrooms) and academic scholars.
Last, I am heavily involved in institutional efforts to develop computational social science, computational sociology, and education data science on Stanford's campus.
