The Department of Materials Science and Engineering welcomes three new faculty members. James Weaver has joined as an associate professor whose research explores biologically-inspired materials and advanced fabrication. Hari Nair, who has been advancing semiconductor research at Cornell since 2020, has taken on a new role as assistant professor. And Matt Ferguson will be joining the faculty in 2026 as an assistant professor continuing his research developing new approaches for identifying and controlling the electronic properties of quantum materials.
Weaver, who has a joint appointment in the multi-college Department of Design Tech, runs the Wide-Field Electron Optics Laboratory and leads the Biologically Inspired Materials and Design Group. Working at the interface between zoology, materials science, biomedical engineering and multi-material 3D printing, his main research interests focus on investigating structure-function relationships in hierarchically ordered biological composites and the advanced fabrication of their synthetic analogues.
Weaver has played critical roles in the development of new model systems for the study of a wide range of biomineralization processes and is an internationally recognized and award-winning scanning electron microscopist. He has coauthored more than 150 journal articles in the biological, physical and geological sciences. His work has been featured on the covers of more than 40 scientific journals, and he has contributed to numerous collaborative art installations, which have been exhibited in Berlin, Boston, Frankfurt, London, New York, Paris and San Francisco.
Weaver received his bachelor’s degree in aquatic biology and Ph.D. in marine science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and went on to pursue postdoctoral studies in molecular biology, chemical engineering, physics and earth history.
“I am absolutely thrilled that James Weaver will be joining Cornell,” said Lara Estroff, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry. “Through his multidisciplinary work James has helped define what it means to work at the intersection between design and materials science. His hire opens exciting new opportunities for our students in the classroom and the research lab.”
Nair established new metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) capabilities at Cornell in his previous role as an assistant research professor, a technique he now applies to the growth of ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors such as gallium oxide and aluminum nitride.
These ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors are critical for developing next generation power electronics and radio-frequency applications. A recently installed nitride MOCVD tool in Nair’s lab enables exploration of the growth of epitaxial films and heterostructures of transition metal nitrides for quantum applications such as epitaxial Josephson junctions.
“I hope that this work will help us establish more collaborations with industry,” Nair said. “This MOCVD capability in my group is synergistic with the excellent thin film synthesis capabilities already existing at Cornell. As an assistant professor, I will continue the research directions already established in my group and explore new directions, specifically the MOCVD growth of transition metal nitrides for quantum information science applications. In addition, I am thrilled to start teaching our excellent undergraduate and graduate students.” Nair received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and his B.Tech. in engineering physics from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2006.
Matt Ferguson will be joining Cornell in Fall 2026 as an assistant professor. Ferguson earned his Ph.D. in physics from Cornell in 2022. His doctoral work focused on using scanning superconducting sensors to visualize the electronic properties of superconductors and topological insulators. He then moved to the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, where he is developing techniques to probe and control the properties of superconducting and magnetic materials.
Ferguson’s research is focused on unlocking the new electronic functionality promised by quantum materials. These materials exhibit behavior which is unavailable in the semiconductors, metals and insulators which make up the majority of our information processing devices. Quantum materials have the potential to enable new energy-efficient devices and to unlock fundamentally new approaches to information processing.