| Sumario: | It was when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s that Marvin Cohen created his first atomic recipe. While the young Marvin Cohen did not exactly turn lead into gold, he showed that--in theory, at least--certain doped semiconductors could become superconductors. As a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Cohen developed a 'pseudopotential' theory that allows researchers, with the help of computer programs, to model and predict how solid materials change when put under intense pressure, or when alloying elements are added. Some of his old pupils and post-doctoral researchers still call him up with problems, says John Joannopoulos, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and himself a former student of Cohen's. Cohen has focused on jump-starting applications in nanotechnology. In the late 1990s, he teamed up with Alexander Zettl, also a professor at Berkeley, to found Nanomix.
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