A foundation dedicated to science, patient care safety, and environmental conservation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, was fittingly founded in 2000 by the Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, and his wife Betty. As of 2022, it has launched the Experimental Physics Investigators (EPI) Initiative, supporting mid-career scientists working in especially high-risk, high-reward, boundary-pushing research of experimental physics and chemistry—including an annual grant exceeding one million dollars to those in the aforementioned fields of research.
On Oct. 1, it was announced in the brandeis.edu section for Science and Technology that Dr. W. Benjamin Rogers, Brandeis’ own associate professor of physics and engineering science, had been part of a winning group among five individuals nationwide (containing 21 STEM scholars), who were awarded the 2026 annual grant of $1.35 million, spanning five years. This amounts to a substantial average of $270,000 a year for Rogers and his team of experimental physics researchers—which includes Princeton’s distinguished assistant Professor of Chemistry, Dr. William M. Jacobs. Approaching 11 years at the university, Rogers plans to study “how soft materials self-organize when they are driven by processes that consume energy.” More specifically, he wants “to better understand a class of ‘microstructured’ materials that self-organize at very small scales and are formed by spontaneous phase separation, or demixing of fluids—not unlike the way oil and vinegar separate in a bottle of salad dressing.” This research will serve people worldwide by decoding the fundamental physics of cellular organization, which may offer potential insights for diagnosing human diseases and engineering next-gen synthetic materials.
In other words, scientists are studying the basic rules of how cells build and organize themselves, in order to ultimately create breakthroughs that benefit our oncological (cancer treatment), neurodegenerative (cognitive), cardiometabolic (heart), and regenerative (organ) health. For context, the Moore Foundation’s EPI initiative is based in west-coast Palo Alto, CA, and led by program director Theodore Hodapp. The foundation itself is part of a larger collection of STEM research organizations which frequently work alongside the American Physical Society’s (APS) full-time physics department, in which Hodapp formerly served as the Director of Education and Outreach: “From the start, our aim has been to accelerate progress at the frontier of experimental physics by giving brilliant mid-career scientists the kind of flexible, sustained support that federal grants rarely can … That freedom lets them take on risky, high-reward experiments and follow ideas when research results lead them down new pathways.”
Back at east-coast Brandeis, W. Benjamin Rogers is also the Chair of the Engineering Department, as well as the tenured Soffer Associate Professor of Engineering Science—the field in which he plans to utilize the funds: “People believe that activity of living systems, that burning of fuel, fundamentally alters this process of phase separation. And that’s what we want to try to study.”
