The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration, and Krishnan will be the Jeffrey S. and Margaret Mais Padnos Fellow during her yearlong fellowship there. 

“I’m honored to have won a Radcliffe fellowship,” she said. “In any given cohort you might find poets, playwrights, astronomers, mathematicians, historians and literary scholars all in conversation, and I’m deeply honored and excited to be part of that community.”

Krishnan, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and the Department of English in the ˝Ű×ÓĘÓƵ & Sciences, has a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford and an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She said she came to Georgetown in 2020 in part because she was drawn to the university’s interdisciplinary environment. 

“Students gravitate naturally toward work that crosses disciplines,” Krishnan said. “And the faculty are welcoming of it. Many of them are leaders in polyglot thinking and approaches. …It’s part of something I value deeply about Georgetown, which is its commitment to intellectual production in service of social and communal good.”

Her work on the Hilltop spans the history of medicine, literary studies and clinical research, and her interests include diagnostic thinking and clinical reasoning, as well as the pressing problems of diagnostic disparities and the diagnostic error in patient care. Krishnan has also published widely on historical and contemporary pandemics. 

“Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan’s scholarship is both exceptional and transformative in that it contributes substantially to both of her academic fields,” said , a professor and chair of the Department of English. “The significant recognition that she has received from prestigious fellowships like that of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute is a testament to the impact of her innovations. Through this fellowship and through her outstanding scholarly research, she is highlighting the interdisciplinary academic excellence of Georgetown’s English department, Medical School and Medical Humanities Initiative in an extraordinary way.”

In her upcoming book, Krishnan hopes that readers will learn a different understanding of where clinical reasoning comes from. 

“We tend to think of diagnosis as purely scientific, but it owes as much to narrative imagination as to the scientific method,” she said. “The doctor and the detective emerged as twin figures in the 19th century, and that kinship still shapes how physicians think today.”

(Top photo of Lakshmi Krishnan by Tina Krohn)

Jennifer Boum Make, Rutgers University Press

Alex Brostoff, The MIT Press

Jamall Calloway, Columbia University Press

Daniel Cano, Trayecto

Alexandra DeCandia, et.al., Molecular Ecology

Paul Elie, MacMillan Publishers

Tania Gentic, Durham: Duke University Press

Bradley Gorski, Cornell University Press

Nathan Hensley, Chicago University Press

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Kelsey Alejandra Moore, The Public Historian

Rosemary Ndubuizu, The University of North Carolina Press

Felicitas Opwis, Leiden: Brill Publisher

Manus Patten, Harvard University Press

Robert Patterson, Oxford University Press

Cristina Sanz, John Wiley & Sons

Danielle Wiggins, University of Pennsylvania Press

A key figure of merit for a magnet is the ability of its magnetization to strongly prefer a specific direction, known as magnetic anisotropy, which is a cornerstone property for modern magnetic technologies. 

Today, the strongest anisotropy materials for permanent magnets depend heavily on rare-earth elements, which are expensive, environmentally damaging to mine and vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions and geopolitical instability. For thin film applications, certain alloys of iron and platinum have become the materials of choice for next generation magnetic recording media, which contain precious metal platinum. Finding high-performance alternatives based on earth-abundant elements has therefore been a long-standing scientific and technological challenge.

A team led by professors and and graduate student Willie Beeson (G’25) in the at Georgetown University ˝Ű×ÓĘÓƵ & Sciences recently discovered a new type of strong magnets based on high entropy borides using earth-abundant transition metals and boron. The materials are both rare-earth-free and precious-metal-free, offering a compelling new strategy for sustainable magnet design. Their results are published in the journal .

“We offer a sustainable approach to making strong magnets that may be used for many applications, from future magnetic recording media to permanent magnets,” said Liu, one of the senior authors of the study. “More importantly, this points to the potential to alleviate the dependence on critical materials for magnets and other applications.”

High-entropy alloys are materials containing five or more elements in near-equal proportions. They have recently emerged as a powerful platform for materials discovery. Their vast compositional space enables access to novel electronic structures and properties. However, most studies of such alloys focus on chemically disordered cubic structures, which are ill-suited for strong magnetic anisotropy that prefers lower crystal symmetry. 

The researchers overcame this limitation by focusing on high-entropy borides, where boron promotes chemical ordering and lower-symmetry crystal structures. They targeted a crystal structure with tetragonal symmetry — imagine stretching a cube along one of its sides — called C16 phase. This structure is known in boron-based materials made from two or three elements but is largely unexplored in more complex materials.

Beeson synthesized these high-entropy borides using a combinatorial sputtering method in Liu’s lab, where atoms of the multiple target materials thoroughly mix by the time they are collected on a heated substrate. This approach also allowed rapid explorations of a large number of material compositions. On a single substrate, about 50 samples can be made simultaneously under identical conditions but with varying compositions. 

Key Findings

• Discovery of a new class of strong magnets: The team realized the first high-entropy borides in the C16 crystal structure using earth-abundant 3d transition metals — those that occupy the first row of the d-block of the periodic table — establishing a new class of ordered high-entropy magnetic materials.
• Anisotropy enhancement through chemical mixing: By introducing multiple 3d transition metals and systematically exploring composition space using a combinatorial co-sputtering approach, the researchers transformed the magnetization to point to a preferred direction with a significantly larger anisotropy.
• Record-level performance without rare-earths: Newly discovered quinary boride compositions exhibit strong magnetic anisotropy approaching that of rare-earth permanent magnets and exceeding previously reported values for rare-earth-free high entropy materials.
• Theory and experiment in agreement: Density functional theory calculations confirm the experimental trends and identify optimized electronic structure, particularly valence electron concentration and effective magnetic moment, as the origin of the enhanced anisotropy.

“We’re continuing exploring even better permanent magnets or recording media with different compositions on different underlying crystal structures,” said Yin, another senior author of the study. “With the help of machine learning we are hoping to make more rapid progress.”

Impact and Applications

The results establish a boron-assisted, high-entropy synthesis strategy for achieving strong magnetic anisotropy using earth-abundant elements alone. These materials are especially promising for applications that demand high anisotropy, such as:

• Heat-assisted magnetic recording media
• Spintronic devices and magnetic tunnel junctions
• Energy-efficient, rare-earth-free permanent magnets

By demonstrating that high magnetic anisotropy can be engineered without rare-earth elements, using only abundant transition metals, this research opens new pathways toward sustainable magnetic technologies. Beyond magnetism, this work highlights the vast and largely unexplored potential of ordered high-entropy materials as a discovery platform for advanced functional properties.

The team also included postdoctoral fellows and , and graduate student Bradley Fugetta (C’23). The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), 5E Advanced Materials and the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem Services & Support (ACCESS) program. 

Beeson and Liu are co-inventors on on Boron-based and high-entropy magnetic materials filed by Georgetown University.

Contacts:

Kai Liu
Georgetown University, Department of Physics
Email: kai.liu@georgetown.edu

Gen Yin
Georgetown University, Department of Physics
Email: gen.yin@georgetown.edu