On October 1st Marc Serra will start as tenure track group leader at AMOLF. His Hyper Smart Matter group will be embedded in the Designer Matter research theme at AMOLF. Serra intends to design and build complex materials that manipulate sound waves to process information. These materials will enable a wide variety of new devices, from computers that consume very low power to soft robots that accomplish complex tasks autonomously. Serra aims to simultaneously solve practical problems and understand how physical principles such as the laws of thermodynamics fundamentally limit the energy efficiency of computers.
Serra did his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, in the group of Prof. Chiara Daraio, during that time, he investigated nonlinear processes to harvest energy from random ambient vibrations. Until the end of September he will continue his work as a senior scientist at the Environmental and Exploratory Geophysics group at ETH, using acoustic waves to image the subsurface of the earth.
