Vice Provost and Dean of Research, Marvin Chodorow Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics, Stanford University

Kam Moler

Kathryn Ann Moler is Dean of Research at Stanford University. She received her BSc and Ph.D. from Stanford University. After working as a visiting scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1995, she held a postdoctoral position at Princeton University from 1995-1998. She joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1998, and became an Associate in CIFAR's Superconductivity Program (now called the Quantum Materials Program) in 2000. She became an Associate Professor (with tenure) at Stanford in 2002 and is currently a Professor of Applied Physics and of Physics at Stanford. She currently works in the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials (GLAM), and is the Director of the Center for Probing the Nanoscale (CPN), a National Science Foundation-funded center where Stanford and IBM scientists continue to improve scanning probe methods for measuring, imaging, and controlling nanoscale phenomena. She lists her scientific interests and main areas of research and experimentation as Single vortex dynamics in classical and high temperature superconductors, Spontaneous currents and vortex effects in highly correlated electron systems, and Mesoscopic superconductors and currents in normal metal rings, with an increasing interest in the spin properties of such small structures. Early in her career, with John Kirtley from IBM, their research demonstrated that one of the predictions of a popular theory for high-temperature superconductivity was inaccurate by a factor of 10. In 2011 her research group placed two non-magnetic materials (complex oxides) together and discovered an unexpected result: The layer where the two materials meet has both magnetic and superconducting regions. These are two properties that are normally incompatible, since "superconducting materials, which conduct electricity with no resistance and 100 percent efficiency, normally expel any magnetic field that comes near them." Exploration of this phenomenon will be aimed toward discovery of whether the properties co-exist uneasily, or this marks the discovery of an exotic new form of superconductivity that actively interacts with magnetism. In May 2018, Professor Moler was named Vice Provost and Dean of Research at Stanford University. In 2020 she served as the transition dean for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.