Alejandro Strachan is trying to get materials engineering students to see the small picture. More to the point, he’s trying to get them to envision the tiniest of building blocks that will lead to something bigger. His goal: to strengthen student aptitudes in both the materials sciences and the realm of the imagination.

“We think in terms of atoms and build up to real materials,” says Strachan, an assistant professor of materials engineering. His intent is to help students, who may eventually work in nanotechnology areas, develop stronger backgrounds and begin thinking in terms of “micro,” not “macro.”

With a background in physics, the native Argentinean (from Buenos Aires) is interested in statistical mechanics, or how things average out to complex phenomena. A theorizer and not an experimenter, Strachan says that Purdue “felt like the right place.” Here, he does have the opportunity to collaborate with experimentalists from materials engineering and elsewhere.

So how does he work this all into a teaching philosophy? “In many cases the bottom-up approach is useful,” Strachan says. “You can explain and understand things a lot easier if you start with a few atoms and a little bit of quantum physics. If you know the hydrogen atom, for example, which is not a very difficult problem to solve analytically, you can explain much about bonding and why carbon silicon behave differently from one another. That is the type of intuition we’re trying to achieve.”

To help further this understanding, Strachan and his students make use of and contribute to Purdue’s Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), the National Science Foundation-sponsored center where researchers are able to demonstrate novel computing devices. NCN allows students to simulate and “play” with atoms—heating them up, slowing them down, and testing their limits all based on theories handled by computer programs.

It’s a type of technology that wasn’t available to Strachan when he was a student. “We’d use coins to build models of atoms, and then move them around,” he says. “I believe the NCN tools provide much more fidelity.”

His students seem to be high on the fidelity as well. Within a class of about 18, Strachan will typically have students from a variety of disciplines: from materials and mechanical engineering, to electrical and computer engineering and even pharmacy. Anyone really, he says, interested in becoming more familiar with an intuition that will better serve science.

For Strachan, recipient of the school’s 2007 Reinhardt Schumann, Jr. Undergraduate Teaching Award, learning is not just about solving equations. Through the development of intuitive skills, he’s helping that mix of students figure out what equations need to be solved. “We can provide the tools and facilitate,” he says, “but in the end, it’s up to the students to discover and learn.”

And from atoms up through skyscrapers, Strachan has got them seeing the materials world in a whole new way.

William Meiners