Professor Salvador's research interests lie in the areas of thin film synthesis/growth, characterization, and architectural design of inorganic crystalline materials. His current focus is on the design of materials having structural features engineered from the sub-nanometer to the micron length scale. His group uses pulsed laser deposition and molecular beam epitaxy to grow crystals of oxides, nitrides, oxynitrides, metals, and composites (or heterostructures) of those materials for a variety of applications in the fields of energy, information storage, hard coatings, and RF electronics. Examples of research areas include surface engineering of catalysts used in chiral separations, solid oxide fuel cells, and solar hydrogen composites; determination of structure-property relationships in heterostructured films for probe data storage; design of nanostructured superlattice thin films for hard coatings, RF circuits, and information storage; thin film synthesis of metastable and artificially layered ferroelectric, dielectric, and magnetic crystals; the design of multifunctional (and/or multiferroic) materials using chemical principles and thin film processing; and the determination the evolution of microstructures in thin films and solid oxide fuel cell cathodes.