Ricardo Ruiz is a staff scientist at The Molecular Foundry at LBL with 15 years of experience in the magnetic storage and semiconductor memory industry. His research explores the use of self-assembly in hierarchical soft-matter to advance nanopatterning and nanofabrication with molecular-scale precision. This includes the use of functional polymer brushes, block copolymers, colloidal nanoparticles and biomolecules in conjunction with top-down fabrication, plasma etching and atomic layer deposition. He received his PhD in Physics from Vanderbilt University in 2003. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University and at IBM T.J. Watson. From 2006 to 2019 he held various appointments at Hitachi GST/ HGST/ Western Digital where he contributed to the nanofabrication of magnetic bit patterned media and non-volatile memories. He also managed a research Group dedicated to block copolymer and nanoparticle lithography. He received the ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.