Curriculum Vitae 

Robert D. Shull was born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on November 12, 1946. After graduating from Lexington High School (Lexington, Massachusetts) in June 1964, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in Metallurgy and Materials Science in June 1968 after presenting a thesis on the particle size effects of V₂Zr on the critical fields (H_C) and critical currents (I_C) in superconducting Zr-V alloys. In the fall of 1968 he entered the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to begin graduate work on the x-ray diffraction of AB₃-type compounds. He served in the United States Army from February 1969 to February 1971 and recommenced his graduate program at the University of Illinois in September 1971. He received a Master of Science degree in Metallurgical Engineering in June 1973 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the same field in September 1976. During his latter graduate work he investigated the magnetic properties of many alloy systems under the direction of Professor Paul Beck, concentrating on order-disorder effects and properties of magnetically dilute systems. He was the discoverer of spin-glass and time-dependent behavior in Fe-Cr and Fe-Al alloys as well as the "reversed Curie temperature" phenomenon in Fe₇₀Al₃₀. From January 1976 to November 1979 Dr. Shull was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology to work with Professor Pol Duwez in the study of amorphous metals.  During this period he used a microcalorimeter of his design (which allowed the measurement of very small mass samples down to 4.2 K) to show the existence of enhanced phonon modes at low frequencies in several early transition metal + late transition metal metallic glasses.

　　　 From November 1979 to the present Dr. Shull has been a member of the staff of the Metallurgy Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) located in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Initially, he set up the rapid solidification facilities which were used in the discovery of "quasicrystals" at this institution and was one of the first to show the power of small angle neutron scattering (SANS) in the characterization of amorphous metals. By means of differential scanning calorimetry (DTA), x-ray and neutron diffraction, and both optical and electron microscopy he was successful at clarifying the equilibrium phase diagram of the titanium-rich end of the Ti-Al system; and recently, Mössbauer measurements he conducted on nanocomposites of Ag + Fe₃O₄ have shown the existence of a very surprising grain size (and magnetic) transition in these sputtered thin film materials at a composition of only 5 wt % Ag. While working at NIST Dr. Shull was also part of the collaboration that prepared the first thin films of a high T_C superconductor by the laser ablation process (now the method of choice of US industry for making thin films of these materials) and pioneered the magnetic-field-modulated microwave-absorption (MAMMA) measurement technique for very high sensitivity detection of superconducting transitions, was part of the effort that made the first direct observation of the atoms in high T_C materials by field ion microscopy (FIM), and performed the low temperature magnetization measurements which first explained the novel "attractable levitation" effect found by others in some high T_C superconducting oxide composites. International attention was particularly directed to Dr. Shull for his prediction and verification of the "Enhanced Magnetocaloric Effect" in nanocomposite materials, a finding which may have important ramifications in the field of magnetic refrigeration. (A 2004 publication of his on the huge effects of dopant additions to Gd₅Ge₂Si₂ has even caused a re-evaluation in the refrigeration industry on how to properly compare magnetic refrigerants.) His surprising discovery that the remagnetization behavior in exchange-biased thin films proceeds by completely different processes when remagnetizing in opposite directions has caused the international magnetics community to revisit this area as it may have significant ramifications in the magnetic devices industry. And his discovery two years ago of a "Spin Density Wave” in a material (FeAl) with ferromagnetically interacting spins finally ends a 40-year old search by the magnetics community for such a theoretically predicted entity.