There’s a big gap between memory and storage, and Dr. Anirudh Badam, of the Systems Research Group at Microsoft Research, wants to close it. With projects like Navamem, which explores how systems can get faster and better by adopting new memory technologies, and HashCache, which brings with it the promise of storage for the next billion, he just might do it.

Today, Dr. Badam discusses the historic trade-offs between volatile and non-volatile memory, shares how software-defined batteries are changing the power-supply landscape, talks about how his research is aiming for the trifecta of speed, cost and capacity in new memory technologies, and reminds us, once again, how one good high school physics teacher can inspire the next generation of scientific discovery.