The University of Illinois recently welcomed a noteworthy alumnus of the College of LAS. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work returned to campus for a tour of several state-of-the-art research facilities.
Work (BS, ’74, biology) visited as an official representative of the Department of Defense (DoD), for which he has served as deputy secretary since 2014 when appointed by the Obama administration. Work visited the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology to learn about research advances in materials and observed Illinois robotics research at the Intelligent Robotics Lab in the Coordinated Science Lab.
Accompanied by Jeffrey Moore, director of the Beckman Institute and the Murchison-Mallory Professor of Chemistry at Illinois, Work toured the Autonomous Materials Systems (AMS) lab, where researchers from chemistry, aerospace engineering, and materials science and engineering create synthetic materials that can react to their environment, recover from damage, and even self-destruct once their usefulness has come to an end.