The first thing you notice about Gerbrand Ceder's materials science lab at MIT is that there are no crucibles, no furnaces, no crystal-growing instruments. Instead, you find a row of high-resolution computer displays with grad students and postdocs tweaking code and constructing colorful 3-D images. It's in this room, quiet except for the hum of fans cooling the computer power, where new high-tech ceramics and electronic materials that have never been seen or made before are being forged. They are taking form "in virtuo"-designed from scratch on the computer, distilled out of the basic laws of physics.

The next thing you're likely to notice is how young Ceder is. Quick to laugh but intensely passionate in explaining his work, the 33-year-old associate professor is one of a new breed of materials researchers, trained in traditional processing techniques, who have turned to discovering materials using computers. The dream is simple: Replace the age-old practice of finding new substances by trial and error, with calculations based on the laws of quantum mechanics that predict the properties of materials before you make them.