Among the many opportunities that await a new faculty member, Ludovico Cademartiri, associate professor of materials science and engineering (MSE), is looking forward to working in a research area foreign to most materials engineers—studying soil.
Cademartiri, a native of Italy, developed his interest in science and engineering at the University of Parma in Italy while deciding whether to study chemistry or physics, the two subjects that interested him most.
“I was growing increasingly frustrated that any choice I made would imply choosing between physics or chemistry, as if these two languages had to be competing for the description of the universe,” explains Cademartiri. “I thought it couldn’t be a good idea for me just to study one and wanted to find a more holistic vision of science.”
Around that same time, the university began offering a degree in materials science, a major only established in Italy few years earlier. Intrigued by the new major, Cademartiri began to read more into the curriculum and discovered it was the answer to his problem. Instead of choosing between physics and chemistry, he could now study something that encompassed both.
In 2002, he graduated with his laurea magistrale, the Italian version of an undergraduate degree. He received his doctorate at the University of Toronto in Canada in 2008. Toronto was also where he met his wife, Rebecca Cademartiri, a new adjunct MSE faculty member.
In Canada, Cademartiri received several awards for his work as a PhD student, including the Materials Research Society (MRS) Graduate Student Award—Silver Medal in 2005 and 2006, American Chemical Society DIC Young Investigator Award, and the (Canadian) Governor General’s Gold Medal in 2008.
A short time later, Cademartiri took a second postdoctoral position under the direction of famous Harvard researcher George M. Whitesides, who he found to be a thoroughly inspiring mentor and teacher.
“Professor Whitesides has a very specific view of what chemistry and science should be, a view I find utterly refreshing and powerful, yet realistic and pragmatic,” he says. “The group worked on all sorts of important problems, but the research wasn’t necessarily on the radar of the rest of the scientific community.”
One of those topics combined electrical fields and flames—the research focus of Cademartiri’s three years at Harvard. Cademartiri noted how little we actually know about flames and how important they are to us in terms of powering our cars or coal power plants. From their research, the group found that an appropriately shaped and timed electric field could be used to manipulate and even extinguish a flame, leading the team to study similar effects using acoustic waves, or sound.
“My work under Professor Whitesides embodies, in many ways what I think a postdoctoral experience should be—something that broadens your horizons, restores your curiosity, diminishes your fear of tackling big and different problems, and gets you thinking about research beyond the one field you studied,” Cademartiri says.
Continuing the philosophy of building a wide-ranging research expertise, Cademartiri will be exploring something new for a materials engineer: the structural and chemical characteristics that make soil fertile. Cademartiri says many people have questioned his research goals and asked what soil has to do with materials science and engineering.
“From my point of view, soil is a very complex biomaterial that we can essentially describe as a “sponge” made of organic matter, inorganic matter, air, water, and organisms,” Cademartiri explains. “I can see certain similarities with tissues in the human body.”
Cademartiri says his approach explores soil science from an engineering perspective. He plans to use materials chemistry and engineering to create controlled environments to study the response of plants to certain characteristics of the soil. He is currently working on the project with Tom Sizmur, a postdoctoral fellow from England. They are creating a lab on campus and looking for faculty and students who are not afraid of breaking into a new field to join their team.
Beyond getting his lab set up, Cademartiri’s main goal will be contributing to the success of his students in the undergraduate thermodynamics course he will teach this fall. While this is his first teaching position, he says he will be equally focused on research and teaching. “When teaching is really your priority, then good research should ideally come naturally. On the other hand, to teach your students the lessons they need to learn in the classroom, you have to do good research. There is no way to think of them as separate,” he says.