Technological Entrepreneurship: A Key to World Peace and Prosperity

Dan Shechtman, an Iowa State Distinguished Professor of materials science and engineering and research scientist at Ames Laboratory, won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The honor was awarded for his discovery of quasicrystals, crystalline materials with a periodic atomic structure deemed impossible in modern crystallography. He is also the Philip Tobias Distinguished Professor of Materials Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he has taught a course in technological entrepreneurship for nearly thirty years. He joined Iowa State and the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in 2004. His current research efforts center on developing strong and ductile magnesium alloys for a variety of applications, and deformation mechanisms in B2 intermetallics.