Title:Engineering at the Limits of the Nanoscale: From Atoms to Function
Speaker: Farnaz Niroui, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Abstract
Rapid advances in intelligent physical systems, artificial intelligence, distributed sensing, and quantum
technologies are driving the need for fundamentally new paradigms for computing, sensing, actuation,
and communication. Beyond gains in energy efficiency, speed, and sensitivity, future technologies must
also offer new functionalities including adaptability, autonomy, and reconfigurability—capabilities that
increasingly exceed the reach of conventional nanotechnologies. Biological information processing offers
a compelling model, uniting exceptional energy efficiency with distributed, adaptive, and multifunctional
operation. Can these principles inspire a new generation of engineered nanoscale devices and systems?
In this seminar, I will present approaches for engineering complex nanoscale material properties, and
dynamically tuning them, to create new paradigms for computing, memory, sensing, and transduction. I
will first introduce nanomanufacturing strategies—inspired by force engineering and additive
manufacturing—that overcome the resolution and heterogeneous-integration limits of conventional
fabrication, enabling precise integration of atomically engineered materials and molecular building blocks
into functional systems. Building on these capabilities, I will demonstrate material-centric information-
processing platforms in which computation and memory emerge directly from the engineered dynamics
of nanoscale materials under multimodal control. Here, I will highlight examples of nanomechanical
neuromorphic information processing. Finally, I will show how these principles yield sensors and
transducers with enhanced performance and expanded functionality, laying the foundation for adaptive,
multifunctional, and intelligent device and systems.
Farnaz Niroui is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research
pushes the limits of nanoscale engineering, creating and dynamically
controlling complex material properties at the nanoscale to establish new
paradigms for computing, memory, sensing, and transduction. Prior to MIT,
Farnaz was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California Berkeley.
She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT and completed her
undergraduate studies in Nanotechnology Engineering at University of
Waterloo. Farnaz has been the recipient of awards including the DARPA
Young Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Director’s Award,
Rising Stars in Microsystems Award, MIT EECS Outstanding Educator
Award, Junior Bose Award for Teaching Excellence, and Ruth and Joel Spira
Award for Excellence in Teaching.