Credits: Photo: Gretchen Ertl Next image For much of his career, Ju Li thrived on the theoretical aspects of his work, which investigated how manipulating and restructuring materials at the atomic scale could yield surprising and useful new macroscale properties. This research, which he began in 1994 as a graduate student at MIT, was situated at “the interface between the known and unknown,” says Li PhD ’00, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “There was a kind of uncertainty in doing research that was very attractive to me, almost addictive.”