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Bruce van Dover
At Lucent Technologies, van Dover conducted significant research in superconducting magnetic and dielectric materials, including the creation of an amorphous zirconium tin titanium oxide that performs about tenfold better than silicon dioxide. At Cornell, he plans to begin his work by concentrating on fabrication and characterization of thin-film devices and the development of high-throughput synthesis and evaluation of new materials. When he’s not working, he’ll continue to practice martial arts and enjoy contemporary classical music. "The thing that I find exciting is the opportunity to find something completely new, something completely unexpected," says van Dover, who lives with his wife, Corinne, and their three sons in Ithaca. "That’s what I love about doing this research—the feeling that I’ve just learned something that nobody else knows yet. With this high-throughput approach, it’s fun to come to work in the morning, because the odds of finding something from the night before are much, much higher. You never know what you’ll discover." |
After working at Bell Laboratories for 21 years, R. Bruce van Dover took an adjunct position at Columbia University and made a new discovery: he loved teaching. "All along, I’ve had a strong interest in education, and I went into industry with the idea that eventually I would come to academia," says van Dover, who received his PhD in applied physics from Stanford University in 1980 and arrived in Ithaca as a professor of materials science and engineering in early October. "I thought that teaching would be a lot of work, and it really is. But I’ve found that I enjoy the work, and the more I teach, the more interested I become. That’s how I knew I wanted to come to university."