Pedram Khalili Appointed IEEE Nanotechnology Council Distinguished Lecturer
The cohort of eminent scholars will provide public lectures on advancements in nanoscience and nanoengineering
Northwestern Engineering’s Pedram Khalili has been appointed a 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Nanotechnology Council Distinguished Lecturer.
The program recognizes accomplished and eminent scholars who have made technical, industrial, or entrepreneurial contributions in the fields of nanoscience and nanoengineering.
Khalili is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and director of the Physical Electronics Research Laboratory. He is also the director of graduate studies in Applied Physics, a joint PhD program between Northwestern Engineering and Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and is a faculty affiliate of the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy.
The IEEE Nanotechnology Council Distinguished Lecturer initiative aims to promote the field of nanotechnology to the scientific community and to the public more broadly, and also inspire the next generation of nanotechnology engineers and researchers.
The 2024 cohort has 13 members, who are expected to provide a minimum of two lectures during their one-year term at events hosted by IEEE sections, chapters, and student branches, or at public venues including universities, companies, high schools, and science fairs.
Khalili’s research is focused on developing the sustainable, high-performance, and energy-efficient computing systems of the future, starting from novel materials that enable incorporation of new physics and functionalities into devices.
His research interests include nanoelectronics, spintronics, quantum materials, hardware for artificial intelligence, and probabilistic computing architectures.
Khalili’s distinguished lecture topics include “Nanoscale Magnetism: From New Materials to Unconventional Computing Architectures” — a discussion of the current state of magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) development and how emerging device concepts may enable significant advances beyond today’s computing architectures.
In the talk “Nano-electronic Device Implications of Antiferromagnetic Spintronics,” Khalili reviews recent progress in the field of antiferromagnetic spintronics.
Khalili is an associate editor of the academic journal Frontiers in Physics and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Physics: Photonics. A senior member of the IEEE, he is past chair of the Chicago chapter of the IEEE Magnetics Society and is a member of the IEEE Task Force for Rebooting Computing Executive Committee.