TMS ONLINE | MEMBERS ONLY | SITE MAP TMS Board of Directors: Robert D. Shull

Robert D. Shull Past President

Robert D. Shull received an S.B. in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in the same field from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and 1976, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis work, in which he discovered the reversed Curie temperature phenomenon in Fe70Al30, was instrumental in his recent discovery of spin density waves (a phenomenon predicted 40 years ago to exist, but never found) in the same alloy system.

After being awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the California Institute of Technology (1976–1979), he joined the National Bureau of Standards where he initially set up the rapid solidification facility that led to the discovery of quasicrystals in 1980. Shull was also part of the collaboration that prepared the first thin films of a high-TC superconductor by the laser ablation process (named Best Paper of the Year at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University) and his field ion microscopy observation of the high-TC materials was featured on the cover of Science magazine (January 8, 1988). He was the first to explain the novel attractable levitation found in some high-TC materials, and he discovered the enhanced magnetocaloric effect in nanocomposites.

Shull has authored and co-authored more than 140 publications and presented more than 200 invited talks. He has been a member of the International Committee on Nanostructured Materials (ICNM) since 1990 and was its chair from 1999–2001. He was also a founding member of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy subcommittee on Nanoscale Science, Engineering, and Technology, the group that drafted the original National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2001. In TMS, Shull is a past chair of the Electronic, Magnetic & Photonic Materials Division and of the Chemistry and Physics of Materials Committee; he has served on the TMS Program, Publications Coordinating, and Public and Governmental Affairs committees, and is the present chair of the Nanomaterials Committee. Shull has been awarded several National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Director’s Innovation and Competence Awards, the NIST Equal Employment Opportunity/Diversity Award, and the Outstanding Service Award by the NIST Chapter of Sigma Xi. For the past 18 years, he has also led a six-month-long pre-high-school science program for 200 children, called 4H Adventure In Science. He is presently the group leader of the Magnetic Materials Group at NIST. Shull is the son of Clifford G. Shull, the 1994 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.