John Pendry of Imperial College London will give the plenary address at the 2012 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting to be held April 9–13 in San Francisco. The plenary session will be held Wednesday, April 11, at 6:30 p.m. in the San Francisco Marriott Marquis.

In his presentation, Pendry will describe recent developments and future prospects in the area of metamaterials. The properties of a metamaterial depend on its interatomic structure rather than on the composition of the atoms themselves. In collaboration with a team of scientists at Duke University, Pendry has developed the concept of “transformation optics,” which prescribes how electromagnetic lines of force can be manipulated at will. This enabled a proposed recipe for a cloak that can hide an arbitrary object from electromagnetic fields, and has also many applications at optical frequencies to the study of plasmonic systems.

At the Imperial College London, Pendry has been head of the Condensed Matter Theory Group since 1981. He began his career in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, followed by six years at the Daresbury Laboratory where he headed the theoretical group. Among his honors are the Royal Medal from the Royal Society of London and the European Union’s Descartes Prize. Pendry received his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge.