MRS Medal

MRS Medal Recipients

• Joanna Aizenberg, Harvard University and Younan Xia, Georgia Institute of Technology (2017)

  "for developing new synthesis routes inspired by biological principles for the fabrication of advanced complex multifunctional materials and devices"

  Joanna Aizenberg pursues multidisciplinary research that includes biomimetics, crystal engineering and smart materials. She received a BS degree in chemistry from Moscow State University, and a PhD degree in structural biology from the Weizmann Institute of Science. After spending nearly a decade at Bell Laboratories, Aizenberg joined Harvard University, where she is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology and Platform Leader in the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

  Aizenberg is elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, MRS and an external member of the Max Planck Society. She received numerous awards from the American Chemical Society (ACS) and MRS, including Fred Kavli Distinguished Lectureships, Ronald Breslow Award in Biomimetic Chemistry, Arthur K. Doolittle Award in Polymeric Materials, and the ACS Industrial Innovation Award. In 2015, she received the Ledlie Prize awarded for the most valuable contribution to science made by a Harvard scientist. Aizenberg has served on the Board of Directors of MRS and on the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies.

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  "for seminal contributions to shape-controlled synthesis of metal nanocrystals with major impact on catalysis, plasmonics and biomedicine"
  
  Younan Xia holds the Brock Family Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his BS degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1987, MS degree from the University of Pennsylvania (with Alan G. MacDiarmid) in 1993, and PhD degree from Harvard University (with George M. Whitesides) in 1996. His group invented a myriad of nanomaterials for applications in catalysis, plasmonics, electronics, display, energy and medicine. His technology on silver nanowires has been commercialized for the fabrication of flexible, transparent and conductive films central to touchscreen display and flexible electronics. Xia has co-authored >700 publications in peer-reviewed journals, together with a total citation of >110,000 and an h-index of >170. He has been named a Top 10 Chemist and Materials Scientist in the world. He has received many prestigious awards, including the ACS National Award in the Chemistry of Materials, NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and NSF CAREER Award. More information can be found at http://www.nanocages.com.
  
  
• Robert J. Cava, Princeton University (2016)

  "For pioneering contributions in the discovery of new classes of 3D Topological Insulators."

  Robert J. Cava is the Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, where he was Associate Director of the Materials Institute from 1999 to 2001 and Chair of the Chemistry Department from 2004 to 2010. His research includes the solid-state chemistry of electronic and magnetic materials, emphasizing their structure-chemistry-property relationships. Superconductors, magnetic materials, topological insulators, Dirac and Weyl semimetals, geometrically frustrated magnets, thermoelectrics and correlated electron systems are of particular current interest. He began at Princeton in 1997 after working at Bell Laboratories for 17 years, where he was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. He received his BS degree, MS degree in Materials Science and Engineering and PhD degree in Ceramics (1978) from MIT, after which he was a postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Cava has served on international award and evaluation committees, has been the recipient of teaching and mentoring awards at Princeton, and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of The Royal Society (London).
  
  
• Richard B. Kaner, University of California, Los Angeles (2015)

  "For the discovery of efficient methods to synthesize water dispersible conducting polymer nanofibers and their applications in sensors, actuators, molecular memory devices, catalysis, and the novel process of flash welding”

  Richard B. Kaner earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 working with Professor Alan MacDiarmid (Nobel laureate 2000, deceased). After postdoctoral research at Berkeley, he joined the University of California, Los Angeles: 1987 sssistant professor; 1991 associate professor; 1993 full professor; 2012 distinguished professor. He has published over 300 papers in top peer-reviewed journals and holds 20 U.S. patents with 20 more pending. According to the 2014 and 2015 Thomson-Reuters rankings, he is among the world’s most highly cited authors.
  
  Kaner has received awards from the Dreyfus, Fulbright, Guggenheim and Sloan Foundations along with the Exxon Fellowship in Solid State Chemistry, the Buck-Whitney Research Award, the Tolman Medal and the Award in the Chemistry of Materials from the American Chemical Society for his work on refractory materials including new synthetic routes to ceramics, intercalation compounds, superhard metals, graphene and conducting polymers. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Materials Research Society (MRS) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC).

  
  
  
  
• Sharon C. Glotzer and Nicholas Kotov, University of Michigan (2014)
  "For foundational work elucidating processes of nanoparticle self-assembly."  
  
  Sharon C. Glotzer is the Stuart W. Churchill Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Nicholas A. Kotov is the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, both at the University of Michigan.
  
  They hold faculty appointments in Materials Science & Engineering and other departments, and are founding members of the U-M Biointerfaces Institute. Their 10-year collaboration has produced some of the most highly cited papers in the field of nanoparticle self-assembly, predicting, validating and explaining their many experimental and computational discoveries. Glotzer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Among many awards and honors, she is a Fellow of the AAAS and the American Physical Society, a Simons Investigator and a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow. Kotov is an MRS Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is among Thomson Reuters "World’s most influential scientific minds" (2014), their Top 25 Materials Scientists of 2000–2010 and their Top 100 Chemists of 2000–2010. Kotov’s 2007 work was acknowledged by Wired Magazine as among the Top 10 Discoveries of the Year, and he received the NASA Nanotech Briefs Top 50 Award. This year Kotov received the Langmuir Lecturer Award from the American Chemical Society. Glotzer and Kotov each received the Charles M.A. Stine Award from the Materials Engineering & Sciences Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Together, their papers have 40,000 citations. Their joint research is supported by AFOSR, ARO and NSF.
  
  Watch a recording of their talk via MRS OnDemand.
  
  
• Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Northwestern University (2014)

  "For the discovery and development of nanostructured thermoelectric materials"

  Mercouri G. Kanatzidis obtained a B.Sc. degree in chemistry from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece in 1979 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1984. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University from 1985 to 1987, and is currently the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern. Kanatzidis also holds an appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests are in the area of discovery as well as design and synthesis of advanced materials, nanostructures and large crystals. He is interested in thermal and solar energy conversion, radiation detection and superconductors for electronic, optoelectronic and direct power generation applications and also in environmental remediation. Kanatzidis is the recipient of the ACS Morley Medal, Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship, Richard Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, Beckman Young Investigator Award, Guggenheim Fellow and the International Thermoelectric Society Outstanding Achievement Award. He is an MRS and AAAS Fellow. He supervised more than 40 doctoral students and 80 Postdocs working in industry, government and academia. Kanatzidis has over 800 publications and 20 patents with 30,000 citations. The research in his laboratory has been supported by NSF, DOE (BES, EERE, NE, NNSA), ONR, DHS, DTRA, DARPA and industrial and nonprofit organizations.
  
  Watch a recording of his talk via MRS OnDemand.

  
  
  
  
• Alexander Balandin, University of California, Riverside (2013)

  "For discovery of the extraordinary high intrinsic thermal conductivity of graphene, development of an original optothermal measurement technique for investigation of thermal properties of graphene, and theoretical explanation of the unique features of the phonon transport in graphene”

  Alexander A. Balandin is currently professor of electrical engineering and founding chair of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). He received his M.S. (1991) summa cum laude in applied physics and mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Russia, and Ph.D. (1997) in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining UCR, he worked as a research engineer at UCLA. In 2005, he spent his sabbatical as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge, U.K. His research interests are in the area of advanced materials, nanostructures and nanodevices for electronic, optoelectronic and direct energy conversion applications. He conducts both experimental and theoretical research. His work resulted in over 190 journal publications, which were cited ~13,500 times (h>55). Professor Balandin is a recipient of the IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology for 2011. He was recognized by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, UC Regents Award, and Merrill Lynch Innovation Award. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, IEEE, SPIE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology and an associate editor of Applied Physics Letters. He supervised more than 20 Ph.D. students who presently carry out R&D work in industry, government laboratories and academia. The work of his Nano-Device Laboratory (NDL) has been supported by NSF, DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, SRC, NASA and the semiconductor industry. 

  Watch a recording of his talk via MRS OnDemand.
  
  
• Jennifer A. Lewis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2012)
  "For pioneering contributions in the design of viscoelastic inks composed of colloidal, polymeric, and organometallic building blocks and their directed assembly into planar and 3D functional architectures"  
  

  Jennifer A. Lewis joined the faculty of the materials science and engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1990 where she is currently appointed as the Hans Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and serves as the director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory. In 2013, she will join the faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Her research group has made pioneering contributions to the directed assembly of soft functional materials. To date, her work has resulted in over 120 peer-reviewed papers and eight patents. She has served on the editorial advisory boards of Langmuir and Soft Matter and as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Ceramic Society. Lewis is the recipient of the NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow Award (1994), the Brunaeur Award from the American Ceramic Society (2003) and the Langmuir Lecture Award from the American Chemical Society (2009). In addition, she is a fellow of the American Ceramic Society (2005), the American Physical Society (2007), the Materials Research Society (2011) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012).
  
  At the 2012 MRS Fall Meeting, Jennifer Lewis delivered an awards talk entitled "Printing Functional Materials."

  Watch a recording of her talk via MRS OnDemand.
  
  
• Miquel Salmeron, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2012)
  "For his contribution to the molecular level understanding of material surfaces under ambient conditions of gas pressure and temperature made possible by the development and application of Ambient Pressure Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (APPES), which revealed the chemical structure of liquids, catalysts surfaces and nanoparticles during environmental reaction conditions"
  

  Miquel Salmeron graduated in physics from the University of Barcelona and obtained his Ph.D. from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. He is currently a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in the materials science division, which he directed until August 2012. He is also adjunct professor in the materials science and engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the structure, reactions and mechanical properties (friction, lubrication) of materials surfaces and nanomaterials. He pioneered the development of scanning tunneling microscopy for studies of materials surfaces in vacuum and in atmospheric pressures of gases and liquids. He also developed x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy for studies under gases at ambient pressures. His interests include the atomic scale origin of friction, nanoparticle structure and reactivity, solid-electrolyte interfaces for energy storage applications and electronic properties of organic films. He received the Outstanding Research and the Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment Awards from the U.S. Department of Energy in 1995. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society since 1996 and of the American Vacuum Society since 2003. In 2008, he received the Medard Welch Award of the American Vacuum Society and the Langmuir Lectureship Award of the American Chemical Society.
  
  At the 2012 MRS Fall Meeting, Miquel Salmeron delivered an awards talk entitled "Physics and Chemistry of Material Surfaces under Ambient Conditions of Gases and Liquids—What's New?"

  Watch a recording of his talk via MRS OnDemand.
  
  
• Peidong Yang, University of California, Berkeley (2011)
  “For outstanding contributions in the creative synthesis and assembly of semiconductor nanowires and their heterostructures, and innovations in nanowire-based photonics, thermoelectrics, solar energy conversion and nanofluidic applications.”
  

  Peidong Yang received a B.S. in chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China (1993) and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University (1997). He did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining the Department of Chemistry faculty at the University of California, Berkeley (1999). He is currently a professor in the Department of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and a senior faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Yang is the department head/North Site director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) at LBNL. He is the deputy director for the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems. Yang is an associate editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society and also serves on the editorial advisory boards for a number of journals, including Acct. Chem. Res. and Nano. Lett.

  The founder of the Nanoscience subdivision within the American Chemical Society (ACS), Yang has also co-founded two startups, Nanosys Inc., and Alphabet Energy Inc. He is the recipient of the Materials Research Society (MRS) Medal; the Baekeland Medal; the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; the Arnold and Mabel Beckman, National Science Foundation, and MRS Young Investigator Awards; the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics; the ACS Pure Chemistry Award; and the Alan T. Waterman Award. He was recently elected an MRS Fellow. According to ISI (Thomas Reuters), for the past decade, Yang has been ranked number one in materials science and number ten in chemistry based on average citations per paper. His main research interest is in the area of one-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures and their applications in nanophotonics and energy conversion.
  
  At the 2011 MRS Fall Meeting, Yang delivered an awards talk entitled "Semiconductor Nanowires for Solar Energy Conversion."
  
  
• Zhong Lin (Z.L.) Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology (2011)
  “For seminal contributions in the discovery, controlled synthesis, and fundamental understanding of ZnO nanowires and nanobelts, and the design and fabrication of novel, nanowire-based nanosensors, piezotronic devices, and nanogenerators.” 
  
  Zhong Lin (ZL) Wang received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1987. He now is the Hightower Chair in Materials Science and Engineering, Regents' Professor, Engineering Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Nanostructure Characterization, at Georgia Tech. Dr. Wang is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, fellow of American Physical Society, fellow of AAAS, fellow of Microscopy Society of America and fellow of Materials Research Society. Dr. Wang has made original and innovative contributions to the synthesis, discovery, characterization and understanding of fundamental physical properties of oxide nanobelts and nanowires, as well as applications of nanowires in energy sciences, electronics, optoelectronics and biological science. He is a world leader in studying ZnO nanostructures. His discovery and breakthroughs in developing nanogenerators establish the principle and technological road map for harvesting mechanical energy from environment and biological systems for powering a personal electronics. His research on self-powered nanosystems has inspired the worldwide effort in academia and industry for studying energy for micro-nano-systems. He coined and pioneered the field of piezotronics and piezo-phototronics by introducing piezoelectric potential gated charge transport process in fabricating new electronic and optoelectronic devices. This breakthrough by redesign CMOS transistor has important applications in smart MEMS/NEMS, nanorobotics, human-electronics interface and sensors. Dr. Wang’s publications have been cited for over 44,000 times. The H-index of his citations is 101. Details can be found at: http://www.nanoscience.gatech.edu
  
  At the 2011 MRS Fall Meeting, Wang delivered an awards talk entitled "From Nanogenerators to Piezotronics—A Decade Study of ZnO Nanostructures."
  
  
• Walter A. de Heer, Georgia Institute of Technology (2010)
  "For his pioneering contributions to the science and technology of epitaxial graphene."
  

  Walter de Heer earned a doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986 under the supervision of Walter D. Knight. While a graduate student at UC Berkeley, he participated in research that demonstrated the electronic shell structure of metal clusters (these clusters are now also referred to as superatoms). He worked at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland from 1987-1997; while there, he described how magnetism develops in ferromagnetic clusters as their size increases from atomic to bulk.
  
  Currently a Regents' Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he directs the Epitaxial Graphene Laboratory in the School of Physics and leads the Epitaxial Graphene Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Georgia Tech Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.
  
  De Heer and his research groups have made significant contributions to several areas in nanoscopic physics. In 1995, De Heer’s research turned to carbon nanotubes, showing that they are excellent field emitters with potential application to flat panel displays. In 1998, he discovered that carbon nanotubes are ballistic conductors, which is a key property for graphene-based electronics. In 2001, his work led to the development of graphene-based electronics. This project was funded by Intel Corporation in 2003 and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2004. His paper, Ultrathin Epitaxial Graphite: Two-Dimensional Electron Gas Properties and a Route Towards Graphene-Based Electronics, published in 2004, laid the experimental and conceptual foundation for graphene-based electronics. De Heer holds the first patent for graphene-based electronics that was provisionally filed in June 2003.

  At the 2010 MRS Fall Meeting, deHeer presented an awards talk entitled "Epitaxial Graphene for 21st-Century Electronics."

  
  
• Gerbrand Ceder, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2009)
  "For pioneering the high-impact field of first-principles thermodynamics of batteries materials and for the development of high-power density Li battery compounds."
  

  Gerbrand Ceder received an engineering degree in metallurgy and applied materials science from the University of Leuven, Belgium (1988) and a Ph.D. in materials science from the University of California, Berkeley (1991). He then joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is now the R.P. Simmons Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. Ceder’s research interests are in the field of computational modeling of material properties and the design of novel materials. Currently, much of the focus of his work is on materials for energy generation and storage, including battery materials, hydrogen storage, thermoelectrics, electrodes for fuel cells and photovoltaics.
  
  He holds five current or pending U.S. patents and has published over 220 scientific papers in the fields of alloy theory, oxide phase stability, high-temperature superconductors, and Li battery materials. His most recent scientific achievement has been the development of materials for ultrafast battery charging. Ceder has received the Battery Research Award from the Electrochemical Society; the Career Award from the National Science Foundation; and the Robert Lansing Hardy Award from The Metals, Minerals and Materials Society for “exceptional promise for a successful career.” He has also received three awards from the graduate students at MIT for best teaching. He is the founder of Computational Modeling Consultants.

  At the 2009 MRS Fall Meeting, Ceder presented an award talk entitled "The Opportunities and Challenges for First-Principles Materials Design and Applications to Li Battery Materials."

  
  
• Darrell G. Schlom, Cornell University (2008)

  "For his fundamental contributions to the materials science of oxides underlying current and future electronic devices."

  Darrell G. Schlom is a professor in the department of materials science and engineering at Cornell University. After receiving a B.S. from Caltech, he did graduate work at Stanford University, receiving an M.S. in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering. He was then a post-doc at IBM’s research lab in Zurich, Switzerland, in the oxide superconductors and novel materials group managed by Nobel Prize winners J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. In 1992, he joined the faculty at Penn State in the department of materials science and engineering, where he spent 16 years before joining the faculty at Cornell earlier this year.

  His research interests involve the replacement of SiO2 as the gate dielectric in MOSFETs and the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of oxide thin films, especially those with functional properties (ferroelectric, piezoelectric, ferromagnetic, or a combination of these properties), including their epitaxial integration with semiconductors. His group synthesizes these oxide heterostructures using molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). He has published over 300 papers and has seven patents. He was awarded a Semiconductor Research Corporation Fellowship for his graduate studies at Stanford, the Ross N. Tucker AIME Electronics Materials Award in 1989, an IBM Invention Achievement Award in 1991, an ONR Young Investigator Award in 1993, the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 1999 for his sabbatical stay in Jochen Mannhart’s group at the University of Augsburg, the American Association for Crystal Growth Young Author Award in 1999, the ASM International Bradley Stoughton Award for Young Teachers in 1999, a Semiconductor Research Corporation Inventor Recognition Award in 2004, and the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in Engineering in 2006. He was also selected for the Defense Science Study Group for 2004-2006, elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003, served on the MRS Board of Directors from 2005-2007, and was named Distinguished Professor by Penn State in 2007.
  
  This year marks a materials revolution in computers: after over 40 years, the SiO2 gate dielectric of Si-based transistors is being replaced by a material with a much higher dielectric constant (K), HfO2. The materials science basis for this revolution now hitting the market was laid over a decade ago by Schlom’s group when they suggested the thermodynamic stability of HfO2 in contact with silicon (K.J. Hubbard and D.G. Schlom, “Thermodynamic Stability of Binary Oxides in Contact with Silicon,” Journal of Materials Research 11 (1996) 2757-2776). This publication has become the fifth most highly cited paper in the Journal of Materials Research and demonstrates the power of thermodynamics in drastically reducing the number of high-K candidates suitable for this application, i.e., only those that are stable in contact with silicon. A comparison of the materials listed as being appropriate in the 1997 National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors vs. the 1999 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors makes the impact of this work clear. In 1997, the high-K materials listed are (Ba,Sr)TiO3, Ta2O5, and TiO2. All of these materials react with silicon (as Schlom’s thermodynamic analysis published in 1996 predicted); extensive research by semiconductor companies around the world revealed the futility of this approach. These materials were then abandoned in favor of the materials suggested by Schlom’s thermodynamic analysis.
  
  The Si-compatible materials with high K and high bandgap that Schlom’s group identified are being used as gate dielectrics in MOSFETs, dielectric layers in DRAMs, and also as buffer layers when integrating functional oxides (that would react if directly integrated) with silicon. In late 2007, Intel began shipping their new Penryn line of processors, in which the SiO2 gate insulator of the transistors is replaced by an HfO2 dielectric with higher K. IBM and AMD have both announced that they will also use HfO2 to replace SiO2 in their highest performance CPUs. This materials revolution saves power at the same time that it boosts speed. With continued scaling to higher integration densities, DRAMs also need to avoid low-K reaction layers between silicon electrodes and the high-K dielectric layer used in DRAM trench capacitors. The materials being turned to by the semiconductor industry are again the same set that Schlom’s thermodynamic analysis indicated are stable in contact with silicon.

  At the 2008 MRS Fall Meeting, Schlom presented an awards talk entitled "Gate Oxides beyond SiO2 and the High-K Materials Revolution."

  
  
• James F. Scott, University of Cambridge (2008)

  "For his fundamental contributions to the materials science of oxides underlying current and future electronic devices"

  James Floyd Scott was born in Beverly, New Jersey, in 1942, the middle child of three in a working-class family. Neither his parents nor grandparents went through high school, let alone university. His father was orphaned at an early age and went to work in a coal mine at age 13; his mother, the youngest of 10 children, was blinded in an automobile accident at about the same age. Scott attended the public high school in Burlington, New Jersey, and was interested in science, including ham radio (K2PPV).
  
  At 17, he received a scholarship to Harvard, where he majored in physics. After Cambridge, he ventured west to Ohio State. He completed his Ph.D. at age 23 under the supervision of Prof. K. Narahari Rao, a man he greatly admired. The thesis was on experimental optics; timely, with the concurrent invention of lasers. Immediately afterwards, he joined Bell Labs at Murray Hill, working for Sergio Porto on laser Raman spectroscopy of crystals. Over the next six years, he emphasized studies of phase transitions, and in this way, drifted into ferroelectrics. All of his solid-state physics was self taught (his Ph.D. thesis was in the molecular spectroscopy of acetylene). He benefited greatly by working with Paul Fleury, John Worlock and Rogerio Leite.
  
  At age 29, he was appointed full professor of physics at the University of Colorado, where he remained for more than 20 years. His first postdoc there was John Ryan, now professor of physics at Oxford.
  
  While at Colorado, he met his wife, Galya, in the office of Pyotr Kapitza in Moscow. They were married in Moscow in 1982 at the peak of the Cold War. Scott’s venture into thin films and ferroelectric memories came about through Galya, who had been asked to translate a text on ferroelectric thin films by Tomashpolskii for Ramtron Corp. This brought Scott into Ramtron (eventually as director of the technical board), and to close work with Carlos Araujo and Larry McMillan, with whom he later formed Symetrix Corp. The PZT work at Ramtron was done by Scott and others, notably S. Eaton, who was in large part responsible for the “PUND” method of measuring hysteresis without charge injection artifacts [Scott J F et al., Switching Kinetics of Lead Zirconate Titanate Submicron Thin-Film Memories, JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS 64: 787-792 (1988)].
  
  During his 21 years in Boulder, Colorado, Scott was awarded both the prize for best classroom teacher (by a secret ballot of the students) and the university research award as best researcher (an extra sabbatical, spent in Paris).
  
  In 1991, Scott moved to Australia as dean of science, first at RMIT (Melbourne) and later at the University of New South Wales (UNSW, Sydney). Although busy as a dean, he continued to publish papers in Nature and other high-impact journals. In 1997, he received both a Humboldt Prize from Germany and appointment as the SONY Corporation Chair of Science in Yokohama, where he continued his work on ferroelectric memories (FRAMs).
  
  In 1999, he was appointed by invitation research professor of ferroics at Cambridge University, a post he still holds. He received the Monkasho Award from Japan in 2001 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008. He has published more than 400 papers, of which “Ferroelectric Memories” (Science 1989) has 2,400 citations.

  At the 2008 MRS Fall Meeting, Scott presented an awards talk entitled "Some New Properties of Ferroelectrics—THz Emission, Nanodomain Switching, Finite-Size Effects, and Ferroelectrically-induced-Ferromagnetism."

  
  
• Omar Yaghi, University of California, Los Angeles (2007)
  "For his pioneering work on the synthesis, structure and theory of metal organic frameworks."
  

  Omar M. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan (1965). He received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Albany, The State University of New York (1985), and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1990) with Professor Walter G. Klemperer. From 1990-1992, he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University with Professor Richard H. Holm. He joined the faculty at Arizona State University in 1992 and was awarded the ACS-Exxon Solid-State Chemistry Award in 1998. In June 1999, he moved to the University of Michigan as a Professor of Chemistry and was awarded the Robert W. Parry Collegiate Chair by the Chemistry Department at UM, and the Sacconi Medal by the Inorganic Division of the Italian Chemical Society. Since January 2006 he has been the Christopher S. Foote Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA and the Director of the Center for Reticular Chemistry at the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA. Popular Science magazine listed him as one of the ‘Brilliant 10’ in science and engineering. Recently he was awarded the Department of Energy Research and Development Award for outstanding achievements in hydrogen storage research. He has published over 100 articles and is among the top 25 most highly cited chemists with over 100 citations per paper.
  
  His research is focused on using the molecular building block approach for the design and synthesis of new materials. The results of his research have firmly established the building block concept for synthesis of new hybrid organic-inorganic crystals by design. The synthesis of chemical compounds by design has a long history in the field of organic chemistry. However, until recently it was not possible to apply this approach to other compounds, such as extended chemical structures especially those composed of building units that are linked together by strong bonds. In a series of seminal papers published during the past twelve years, Yaghi has established design rules and a synthetic approach which are now used worldwide by chemists, materials scientists and engineers wishing to design and prepare extended structures for a wide variety of applications.
  
  Yaghi’s major conceptual advance was to show that cationic metal-oxygen units can be linked by anionic dicarboxylates into extended solids. He showed that these structures possess exceptional thermal stability, high porosity and are amenable to functionalization. Furthermore, he demonstrated reversible adsorption isotherms, and in 1998-1999 he reported the discovery of the iconic material known as MOF-5. A new class of robust materials, with designed pore functionality and metrics, is now being applied to essential chemical processes such as gas storage, separation, sensors and catalysis. In particular he has developed this chemistry from its basic science to important applications involving on-board energy storage of methane and hydrogen. More recently, he has shown that MOFs are also useful in capturing voluminous amounts of carbon dioxide.
  
  Today over 1000 MOFs are being reported per year and the number of groups joining this area is continually increasing with an estimated 100 groups in academia and industry worldwide investigating MOFs. Yaghi refers to this new chemistry as ‘reticular chemistry’ which he defines as the chemistry concerned with linking molecular building blocks into predetermined extended structures using strong bonds. The results of reticular chemistry have broken several records including the least dense crystals known and MOF crystals of the highest surface areas.

  
  
• Pulickel Ajayan Rensselear Polytechnic Institute (2006)

  “For important developments in the materials science and applications of carbon nanotubes."

  Pulickel Ajayan earned his B.Tech. in metallurgical engineering from Banaras Hindu University (1985), and his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University (1989). After three years of postdoctoral experience at NEC Corporation in Japan, he spent two years as a research scientist at France’s Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Orsay, and nearly a year and a half as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Metallforschung, Stuttgart in Germany. In 1997, he joined the materials science and engineering faculty at Rensselaer as an assistant professor. Presently he is a full professor and holds the Henry Burlage Endowed Chair in Engineering at RPI.
  
  Ajayan's research interests include synthesis, study of structure-property relations of nanostructures and nanocomposites, applications of nanomaterials, and phase stability in nanoscale systems. He has been involved in the development of carbon nanotubes from the start. Soon after the first report of carbon nanotubes appeared in 1991, he and his colleagues at NEC Corporation reported the large-scale synthesis of nanotubes using the electric arc-discharge method. In 1993, he showed how nanotubes could be opened and filled with foreign materials using oxidation and capillarity effects. Over the last decade and a half, he has produced several seminal papers related to the development of carbon nanotubes and nanotube-based materials for materials science applications, and the use of electron-beam irradiation in the modification of carbon nanostructures. His pioneering research works have initiated new developments in many aspects of carbon-nanotube science and technology. Recently, his work has focused on the engineering of various organized carbon-nanotube architectures and the demonstration of these structures in applications leading to gas sensors, flexible composite films, and compressible foams. He is presently involved in the detailed study of aligned carbon- nanotube films and the applicability of these films in new areas of materials technology.

  
  
• Won Bong Choi, Florida International University (2006)

  “For important developments in the materials science and applications of carbon nanotubes."

  Wonbong Choi received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Hanyang University in Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from North Carolina State University in 1997. From 1988 to 1993, he worked with fine ceramic composites and allied materials as a research scientist at Agency Defense & Development. A project manager and senior research scientist at Samsung (SAIT), Choi was a leading scientist in the “Carbon Nanotubes for Tera-level Device” project which received more than $1 million per year in support from Samsung and the Korean government. He was also involved in Samsung’s field-emission display project, leading the team investigating the cold cathodes from 1998-2000. In 2003, after five successful years at Samsung, he became an associate professor in the mechanical and materials engineering department of Florida International University in Miami.
  
  Choi is credited with developing the vertical CNT-field effect transistor and CNT-based non-volatile-memory devices. He has been involved in various cooperative projects, including fuel cells and lab-on-a-chip. His innovations, reported in the TRN News and MIT’s Magazine of Innovation, were the first to demonstrate practical ways of making carbon nanotube-based devices. Choi’s present research interest is focused on the state of the growth of carbon-nanotube and metal-oxide nanowires and their applications for futuristic devices, including nanoscale logic gates; ultra-miniaturized, high-power devices; single-molecule detection platforms; DNA- (gene) recognition systems, etc.
  
  One of the remarkable achievements in his research career was the invention of carbon nanotube field-emission display. In a field-emission display, each pixel has its own individual electron source. No electron-beam scanning is required, as opposed to the working principle of a cathode-ray tube display. Hence, the phosphor element rests very closely to the corresponding electron source, making field-emission displays extremely slick (~1/8-inch), without compromising the brightness, contrast, and resolution offered by cathode-ray tube displays. In 1999, Choi, along with his colleagues at Samsung, demonstrated a fully sealed, 4.5-inch field-emission display using single-wall carbon nanotube organic binders. An outstanding brightness of 1800 cd/m2 at 3.7 V/mm was observed on the entire area of a 4.5-inch panel from the green phosphor-indium-tin-oxide glass. This path-breaking invention was reported in Science magazine. Over the years his research findings matured from their infancy to the state of commercialization. Each pixel of today’s Motorola-developed 5-inch nanoemissive display (NED) or Samsung’s 42-inch prototype display, targeted at a debut market of $65 billion, will perpetuate the importance of Choi’s invention.

  
  
• Mark Thompson, University of Southern California (2006)

  “For development of highly efficient heavy metal phosphor complexes”

  Mark E. Thompson is professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1980 (University of California-Berkeley) and his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1985 (California Institute of Technology). He spent two years as a Schatz Energy Research Center (S.E.R.C.) fellow at Oxford University’s Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory. Thompson took a position as an assistant professor in the chemistry department at Princeton University in 1987. In 1995, he moved his research team to the University of Southern California, where he is currently a professor of chemistry and chair of the chemistry department.
  
  Thompson’s team has been responsible for marked advances in the field of organic electroluminescence. His team has focused largely on molecular materials for electroluminescent devices, but has made contributions to the development polymer-based materials and devices as well. Thompson and his research team (along with their collaborators at Princeton, i.e., S.R. Forrest, et al) demonstrated the first transparent, stacked, and electrophosphorescent devices, contributing significantly to the mechanistic understanding of organic devices. The pioneering work from Thompson’s laboratory in electrophosphorescence has led to device efficiencies that are close to 100%, involving the development of emitters, carrier transporters and blocking materials. His team has demonstrated highly efficient monochromatic electroluminescence (internal efficiencies 60-100%), with a very broad range of accessible emission colors, from violet to near-infrared. They have also demonstrated white broadband-emitting organic devices, utilizing either multiple phosphorescent emitters or a combination of phosphorescent and fluorescent emitters, giving efficiencies exceeding common illumination technologies.

  
  
• Reshef Tenne, Weizmann Institute of Science (2005)
  "For realizing that nanoclusters of layered compound materials (e.g., MoS₂, WS₂) can be made to fold into hollow cage structures, in analogy to graphitic carbon. These structures, known as 'inorganic fullerenes,' constitute a materials class with exciting new properties."
  

  Reshef Tenne studied chemistry and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning his Ph.D. in 1976. He spent three years at the Battelle Institute in Switzerland, first as a postdoctoral fellow, and later as a member of the technical staff. In 1979, he joined the staff of the Weizmann Institute of Science, was granted tenure six years later, and was promoted to full professor in 1995. Tenne has headed the Weizmann Institute of Science department of materials and interfaces since 2000. Appointed director of the Gerhard M.J. Schmidt Minerva Center for Supramolecular Architecture (2001), he was also appointed the first director of the new Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for Nanoscale Science (2003) and the Drake Family Chair of Nanotechnology (2004).

  Tenne's research focuses on the use of photovoltaic materials in solar energy conversion and, more recently, on the synthesis, characterization and applications of novel nanomaterials. In 1992, following the discovery of carbon fullerenes and nanotubes, he proposed that nanoparticles of inorganic compounds with layered structures, such as molybdenum disulfide, would adopt a new, closed-cage crystalline shape, forming tiny balls or nanotubes. Tenne's observations of these compounds, which came to be nicknamed 'inorganic fullerene-like materials,' (IF) led to the birth of a new scientific discipline. It took him and his colleagues four years to synthesize the first member of this family of materials, tungsten disulfide, in large quantities. As a result of these efforts, they were able to demonstrate that such nanoscale 'gball bearings' reduce friction and wear considerably. These observations open up a large variety of potential applications for these new nanomaterials. As these novel materials display great potential for the automotive and many other industries, a start-up company, NanoMaterials, has beenformed to exploit this technology. Scaling-up efforts for large-scale manufacturing of these nanomaterials are well on their way. Nanotubes and fullerene-like nanoparticles of many other inorganic compounds with layered and more recently nonlayered compounds have been synthesized in recent years, offering a plethora of applications.

  
  
• Jacob Israelachvili, University of California, Santa Barbara (2004)

  "For work on adhesion and friction, which has revolutionized the understanding of molecular mechanisms responsible for these technologically vital phenomena."

  Jacob Israelachvili received his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University, England, in 1972. After a two-year European Molecular Biology Organization research fellowship at the University of Stockholm, he went to the Australia National University (1974-1986). He was elected a member of the Australian Academy of Science (1982), a fellow of the Royal Society of London (1988), a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (1996), a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2003), and most recently, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He joined the faculty of the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1986, where he holds joint appointments as professor in the department of chemical engineering, the materials department and the biomolecular science and engineering department. He was the associate director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UCSB from 1993 to 2003. He is the author of a textbook entitled Intermolecular and Surface Forces (Academic Press, 2nd Edition: 1991).
  
  Israelachvili’s research interests are in the general area of intermolecular and inter-surface forces in complex fluid systems. He uses the Surface Forces Apparatus for directly measuring the forces between surfaces in liquids and vapors, and for studying other interfacial phenomena at the molecular level. He also investigates dynamic interactions, such as the micro- and nanoviscosity of thin films, molecular-relaxation processes at surfaces, friction and lubrication. The aim of these studies is to gain insights into the fundamental interactions in complex systems that also have technological applications, for example, in developing adaptable materials and new complex fluid (e.g., lubricant) systems.

  
  
• Toh-Ming Lu, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2004)

  "For seminal contributions to understanding mechanisms of thin-film surface and interface morphology evolution and establishing the foundations of diffraction and scattering methods for its quantitative analysis."

  Toh-Ming Lu, the Ray Palmer Baker Distinguished Professor of Physics, was the former chairman of the physics department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He earned his Ph.D. degree from The University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. Currently, he is the director of a multi-university Center for Advanced Interconnect Systems Technologies (CAIST). CAIST is a nation-wide (distributed) center where 25 faculty members from 13 universities and 40 graduate students are involved in thin-film materials research for advanced interconnect applications. He has authored and co-authored over 350 papers and several books in the area of surface ordering and thin-film processing. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Vacuum Society.
  
  Having begun his research career in the area of surface science, he and his colleague Gwo-Ching Wang have published widely cited works on the study of surface ordering using electron diffraction techniques. Two books were published by their groups in this area of research: Diffraction From Rough Surfaces and Dynamic Growth Fronts (World Scientific Publishing: 1993) and Characterization of Amorphous and Crystalline Rough Surface-Principles and Applications (Academic Press: 2001).
  
  More recently, Lu’s group has extended its interest into the study of fundamental mechanisms that control surface morphological evolution of diverse thin-film processing techniques such as sputter deposition, chemical vapor deposition and plasma etching. Surface morphological, or roughness evolution by these commonly employed deposition or etching techniques, cannot be explained by the conventional mechanisms such as surface diffusion and shadowing alone. Lu’s group has shown that, in addition to these mechanisms, the re-emission effect, which originates from the non-unity sticking coefficient of the deposition flux during growth, can have a profound impact on the evolution of surface morphology. His group has developed a class of theoretical models based on the re-emission mechanism to predict quantitatively the evolution of surface roughness. They showed that shadowing tends to roughen the growth front while re-emission tends to smoothen it. A series of experiments on the deposition of the Si family of materials was carried out, using diverse deposition techniques to quantitatively demonstrate this effect.
  
  The group also showed that the re-emission mechanism during etching plays an equally important role on the morphological evolution of etch front. In etching, shadowing tends to smoothen the etch front while re-emission tends to roughen it. Although film growth and etching are opposite processes, they can both be described by the same re-emission principle with the same dynamical equation. The group showed that re-emission can lead to a novel “universality class” of dynamic scaling behavior in the vertical and lateral correlation lengths of the surface morphology during growth and etching. All these surface roughening effects are expected to play an important role in defining the physical, electrical and optical properties of thin films.

  
  
• Sunil Sinha, University of California, San Diego, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (2004)

  "For seminal contributions to understanding mechanisms of thin-film surface and interface morphology evolution and establishing the foundations of diffraction and scattering methods for its quantitative analysis."

  Sunil Sinha received his B.A. in physics at Cambridge University in England in 1960, and then his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University in 1964. He worked for a year as a visiting research scholar at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center near Bombay, India. In 1965, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Ames Laboratory of Iowa State University working on neutron-scattering studies of condensed matter, particularly in the areas of magnetism and lattice dynamics, at the Ames Laboratory research reactor. He stayed at Iowa State University as a faculty member of the physics department and was appointed a full professor in 1973. In 1975, Sinha moved to Argonne National Laboratory as senior scientist and group leader of neutron scattering, working first at the CP-5 Reactor, and then at the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) facility. In 1977, he spent several months in Nagoya University and other research centers in Japan as a visiting fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science. During this period, he also started to work on X-ray scattering experiments on physisorbed monolayers with synchrotron radiation at the SSRL facility in Stanford. He also worked on magnetic excitations in Chromium and on the structure of magnetic superconductors with collaborators at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1983, after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship, he worked at the Atomic Energy Research Center at Riso, Denmark, and also at the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble, France. In 1983, he also moved to Annandale, New Jersey, as Exxon’s Corporate Research Laboratory senior research associate. With his colleagues at Exxon and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he helped to develop both neutron and synchrotron X-ray capabilities for the laboratory, and to work on problems involving disordered systems, soft-condensed matter, granular materials, surface roughness, and also high-temperature superconductors, soon after they were discovered in 1987. In 1989, he was a visiting senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, working at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) with the BNL X-ray scattering group. He returned to Argonne National Laboratory as senior scientist and as associate division director of the Experimental Facilities Division of the Advanced Photon Source (APS) in 1995. In 2001, he moved to the University of California - San Diego as the LANSCE Professor of Physics, a joint appointment between the University of California and Los Alamos National Laboratory, a position he holds currently.
  
  His research interests currently involve both soft-condensed matter (polymer films, confined fluids and lipid membranes) and magnetic thin films and complex oxide materials. His group carries out experiments at the Manuel Lujan Neutron Scattering Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the APS at Argonne, the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley and the NSLS at Brookhaven, among other facilities. Apart from carrying out scattering experiments on novel systems, he has written several papers on the theoretical analysis and interpretation of scattering data for X-rays and neutrons from systems such as fractal aggregates, two-dimensional crystals, surface fluctuations and experiments involving coherent radiation.
  
  Sinha is a recipient of the 1996 Ernest O. Lawrence award for research in the physical sciences and the 2000 Arthur H. Compton award given by the Advanced Photon Source for contributions to synchrotron radiation.

  
  
• C. Jeffrey Brinker, Sandia National Laboratories and University of New Mexico (2003)

  "For his pioneering application of principles of sol-gel chemistry to the self-assembly of functional nanoscale materials."

  C. Jeffrey Brinker was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and attended Rutgers University where he received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in ceramic science and engineering. He joined Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) as a member of the technical staff in 1979. He was promoted to distinguished member of the technical staff at SNL and appointed distinguished national laboratory professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of New Mexico in 1991. Since 1999, he has been jointly employed at SNL where he is Sandia Fellow and at UNM where he is professor of chemical and nuclear engineering and co-director of the Center for Micro-Engineered Materials.
  
  Brinker has been recognized nationally and internationally for his pioneering work in sol-gel processing the formation of ceramic materials from molecular precursors. This early work launched the successful series of MRS symposia entitled "Better Ceramics Through Chemistry” and culminated in the publication of Sol-Gel Science in 1990 (with co-author George Scherer), a book that remains the most highly cited reference in this rapidly growing field. During the 1990s, Brinker made a number of significant contributions to the fields of porous and composite materials. Through the creative use of silane coupling chemistry, he devised a simple, inexpensive means to prepare aerogels, the world's lightest solids, at room temperature and pressure. By avoiding expensive and often dangerous supercritical (high-temperature and pressure) processing conditions, Brinker, along with co-developer Doug Smith, abolished the 60-year-old barrier to commercial aerogel production and enabled the first preparation of aerogels as thin films. More recently Brinker has combined sol-gel processing with molecular self assembly in a process called evaporation-induced self-assembly that enables the efficient formation of porous and composite nanostructures from homogeneous sols through simple evaporative procedures.
  
  During the past several years, Brinker and his UNM and Sandia colleagues have extended their original work on evaporation-induced self assembly in several significant ways. First, they demonstrated the direct writing of functional self-assembled nanostructures using computer-driven pens and ink-jet printers. This approach, dubbed 'intelligent ink' by the New York Times, provided a simple robust means to form functional, hierarchically organized structures in seconds and established the first link between computer-aided design and self-assembled nanostructures. Second, they demonstrated the self assembly of photosensitive films that incorporated molecular photoacid generators. Exposure of the ordered nanostructured films to UV light enabled dose-dependent (gray-scale) patterning of etchability, wetting behavior, pore volume, pore size and refractive index. This combination of photosensitivity and self assembly should enable standard lithographic procedures to be used both to pattern and to define the structure and function of nanomaterials.
  
  Brinker's prior awards include an R&D100 Award, the American Chemical Society's Ralph K. Iler Award in the Chemistry of Colloidal Materials (sponsored by DuPont), five Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences Awards, the Collegiate Inventors Award and the DOE Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award in Materials Science. In February 2002, Brinker was elected into the National Academy of Engineering.

  
  
• Ivan K. Schuller University of California, San Diego (2003)

  "For his innovative studies of exchange bias in magnetic heterostructures and nanostructures."

  Ivan K. Schuller received his Licenciado (1970) from the University of Chile, M.S. degree (1972) and Ph.D. (1976) from Northwestern University. From 1978-1987, he was a senior physicist and group leader at Argonne National Laboratory. Since 1987, he has been a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego; in addition to this position, he is also layer leader-materials and devices of CAL-(IT)2 Institute, and director-AFOSR-MURI at UCSD. He held visiting professorships at the Catholic University-Santiago, Chile; Universidad del Valle-Cali, Colombia; the Catholic University-Leuven, Belgium, and the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Germany.
  
  Schuller's honors and awards include: DOE Outstanding Scientific Accomplishmentsc1987; Chilean Academy of Sciencesc1992; Corresponding Fellow, Belgian Academy of Sciences c1998; APS Wheatley Awardc1999; Alexander von Humboldt Prizec2000; ISI Highly Cited Researchersc2000; and APS Adler Awardc2003. He is a member of: Materials Research Society (MRS); The American Physical Society (APS)cFellow; Sociedad Chilena de Fisica (Chilean Physics Society-SOCHIFI); and Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA).
  
  Current scientific interests include the preparation, characterization and study of metallic superlattices, heterostructures and nanostructures. Schuller's studies are dedicated to understanding the connection between structure and physical properties; principally, electrical transport, magnetism, superconductivity and mechanical properties. He has also dedicated considerable effort to popularizing physics through public lectures and educational television.

  
  
• Charles M. Lieber, Harvard University (2002)

  "For controlled synthesis of nanowire and nanotube materials."

  Charles M. Lieber attended Franklin and Marshall College for his undergraduate education, graduating with honors in chemistry. After doctoral studies at Stanford University and postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology, he became an assistant professor at Columbia University in 1987. There Lieber embarked upon a new research program addressing the synthesis and properties of low-dimensional materials. In 1991, he moved to Harvard University where he now holds a joint appointment in the department of chemistry and chemical biology as the Mark Hyman Professor of Chemistry, and in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
  
  At Harvard, Lieber has pioneered the synthesis of a broad range of nanoscale materials, the characterization of the unique physical properties of these materials and the development of methods of hierarchical assembly of nanoscale wires, together with the demonstration of applications of these materials in nanoelectronics, biological sensing and nanophotonics. Lieber has also developed and applied a new chemically sensitive microscopy for probing organic and biological materials at nanometer-to-molecular scales. This work has been recognized by a number of awards, including the Feynman Award in Nanotechnology, ACS Pure Chemistry Award and NSF Creativity Award.
  
  Lieber is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of a number of science and technology journals. Lieber has published more than 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals and is the principle inventor on more than 15 patents. Recently, Lieber founded a nanotechnology company, NanoSys, Inc., with the modest goal of revolutionizing commercial applications in chemical and biological sensing, computing, photonics and information storage.

  
  
• Uzi Landman, Georgia Institute of Technology (2002)

  "For molecular dynamics simulations elucidating the microscopic behavior of solid and liquid interfacial junctions and atomistic processes of tribology."

  Uzi Landman obtained a B.Sc. degree from the Hebrew University, M.Sc. degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science and D.Sc. degree from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion). He then worked at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the Xerox research laboratories at Webster, New York and the University of Rochester in New York, mainly in surface science and statistical mechanics. In 1977, Landman joined the school of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is currently a regents' and institute professor, holding the Callaway Chair and serving as the director of a Center for Computational Materials Science.
  
  His main areas of scientific interest are in condensed matter physics, materials science, clusters, chemical physics and biophysics, with an emphasis on the development and use of computational methodologies. He has published over 300 articles in these areas, and for over a decade focused his studies on a broad range of nanoscale phenomena.
  
  Landman's contributions deepened our insights into the microscopic origins of physical and chemical phenomena in systems of basic and technological significance, focusing on the size-dependent evolution of materials properties. He contributed significantly to the conceptual and practical development of classical and quantum simulation and modeling methodologies, playing a key role in transforming them into widely used "computational microscopies" of predictive power. His investigations have had far-reaching impact on both experiments and theory in diverse fields, ranging from surface science, catalysis, microscopic hydrodynamics, and nanotribology to clusters, nanostructures and charge transport in DNA.
  
  He served as Associate Dean for Research of the College of Science at Georgia Tech, and as the president of the Georgia Autistic Society. Landman founded the Journal of Computational Materials Science. He has been honored with several awards, including the 2000 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. Most recently, he presented a plenary lecture at the Nobel Symposium on the Physics and Chemistry of Clusters.

  
  
• C. Mathew Mate, IBM Almaden Research Center (2001)
  "For pioneering studies of friction at the atomic and molecular level."
  
  C. Mathew Mate received his bachelor's degree in engineering science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981 and his Ph.D. in physics from the same university in 1986. For his Ph.D. thesis research, done under the direction of Prof. Gabor Somorjai, he used ultrahigh vacuum, surface science techniques to study the structure of small molecules adsorbed on a rhodium crystal surface. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center as a postdoctoral student, becoming a permanent member of the research staff in 1988. While at IBM, his research interests have focused on trying to understand how friction and lubrication occur at the atomic and molecular level. Much of this work has involved pioneering the use of the atomic force microscope to study tribological phenomena. More recently, he has focused on understanding the friction and lubrication that occurs at head-disk interfaces within disk drives.
  
  He has co-authored over 70 publications. He is a member of the editorial board of Tribology Letters, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and continuing chair of tribology symposia for the Colloid and Interfacial Science Division of the American Chemical Society.
  
  At the 2001 MRS Fall Meeting, Mate delivered an awards talk entitled "On the Road to an Atomic and Molecular Level Understanding of Friction."
  
  
• Norman C. Bartelt Sandia National Laboratories (2001)
  "For contributions to the statistical mechanics of materials surfaces."
  

  Norm Bartelt is a member of the Thin Film and Interface Science Department at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California. Bartelt is a leading theoretician in the area of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics of surface dynamical processes and morphological evolution, which is essential to the development of self-assembly and nanotechnology. In particular he has developed a set of theoretical models linking the temporal evolution of solid surfaces to their atomic structure. This work has transformed the way experiments are performed and analyzed by researchers using real-time imaging techniques. His most recent work has focused on gaining an understanding the dynamics of alloying on metal surfaces and how mass exchange between surface and bulk affects the evolution of surface morphology.
  
  Bartelt has over 70 publications in major journals, including Physical Review Letters, Science and Nature. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Division of Materials Physics, and currently serves on the editorial boards of Physical Review Letters and Surface Science. He joined Sandia in 1995.

  
  
• Dieter M. Gruen, Argonne National Laboratory (2000)
  "For the development and characterization of low-pressure synthesis of nanocrystalline diamond films from fullerene precursors."
  

  Dieter M. Gruen is a senior scientist and an associate director of the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He obtained a B.S. (1944, cum laude) and M.S. (1947) in chemistry from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in chemical physics from the University of Chicago (1951).
  
  Shortly after receiving the baccalaureate degree, Gruen joined the team engaged in the large-scale electromagnetic separation of uranium-235, which was part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. This experience dramatically highlighted the close connection between basic discoveries and their applications, forcefully demonstrating the central role of energy in a technological civilization.
  
  Gruen has made seminal research contributions that have impacted a broad range of topics in the chemistry of materials: the definitive establishment of the 5f character of the actinides by the measurement and ligand field interpretation of magnetic moments at low temperatures; the creation of a solution chemistry in fused salts using spectroscopy to determine oxidation states, complex ions, and coordination equilibria of transition metal ions; the elucidation of the interactions of reactive molecular and atomic species with noble gas matrixes; the rational design of metal alloy hydrides for energy storage and heat pump applications; the determination of the energetics and depth of origin of sputtered species; ultrasensitive detection of atoms and molecules using laser fluorescence and resonance ionization mass spectroscopy; the discovery and development of a new chemical vapor deposition process for the synthesis of phase-pure nanocrystalline diamond films.
  
  Gruen was a visiting scientist at the invitation of Nobel laureate Glenn T. Seaborg at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a delegate to the United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, and a visiting professor at both the Norwegian Technical University and the Hebrew University. He was on the board of the Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science and on visiting committees for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. He has been on the editorial boards of the Annual Review of Materials Science, the Journal of Applied Physics, and Applied Physics Letters. He has received two Department of Energy Materials Science Awards, two R&D 100 Awards, and a University of Chicago Award for Distinguished Performance at Argonne. The Chicago Patent Law Association honored him with its 1988 Inventor of the Year Award. Gruen is the author or co-author of more than 350 publications and editor of several books and monographs. He holds approximately 30 U.S. patents. Among several that have been licensed is one concerning the use of intense ultraviolet laser radiation for the ablation of biological tissue. The process is used worldwide for the treatment of certain cardiovascular diseases.
  
  At the 2000 MRS Fall Meeting, Gruen delivered an awards talk entitled "Ultrananocrystalline Diamond in the Laboratory and in the Cosmos."

  
  
• Samuel I. Stupp, Northwestern University (2000)
  "For seminal contributions to the development of supramolecular materials that exhibit unique properties resulting from their hierarchical organization in the condensed state."  

  Samuel I. Stupp received his B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. He obtained his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University in 1977, joining the faculty as professor of biological materials that same year. In 1980, he became professor of materials science and engineering, chemistry and bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he served as chairman of the polymer division in the department of materials science and engineering. In 1996 he was appointed Swaniund Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry and Bioengineering. In January 1999, he joined Northwestern University as Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science, Chemistry and Medicine. He has been a member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology since its founding in 1989.
  
  His areas of research include supramolecular materials science and self assembly; chemical synthesis of molecules programmed for self organization into functional materials; biomaterials designed for interactions with cells and as scaffolds for tissue engineering; and templating processes for nanostructured inorganic materials including biominerals and semiconductors.
  
  This lecture will describe the assembly of molecules into supramolecular structures less than 10 nanometers in size which then self organize to form films that integrate properties such as nonlinear optical susceptibility, luminescence, and piezoelectricity. In a different example, molecular self assemblers are shown to build a scaffold of one-dimensional structures which enhances the mechanical orientation of polymers. Lastly, self assembling biomaterials for biomedical or biotechnological systems are described that have the capacity to promote or suppress the adhesion of cells, or release nanostructures that travel to cell nuclei.
  
  In 1985, Stupp received the Xerox Faculty Award for Excellence in Engineering Research, and in 1991, he received the Department of Energy Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Materials Chemistry. Also in 1991, he was elected fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1994 Professor Stupp was a member of the Air Force Materials Panel. In 1997 he chaired a National Science Foundation workshop on Interdisciplinary Macromolecular Science and Engineering. This workshop led to a special publication which recommended to the Foundation research directions in this field for the next decade. Also in 1997, he was awarded a Humboldt Senior Award sponsored by the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Science in Mainz, Germany; that same year, he was Joliot Curie Professor in Paris at the Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie. Professor Stupp has also been a visiting professor in Strasbourg sponsored by France's Centre Nationale de la Researche Scientifique. In 1998 he was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1999 was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1999, Stupp was appointed a member of the Department of Energy's Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee and was on the planning committee for the 2000 Nanotechnology meeting at the National Institute of Health. He has served on multiple editorial boards and has been an active consultant for major companies.
  
  At the 2000 MRS Fall Meeting, Stupp delivered an awards talk entitled "Future Materials and Self Assemblers."

  
  
• M. George Craford Hewlett Packard (1999)
  "For pioneering contributions and leadership in the development of visible-spectrum light-emitting diode materials and devices."
  

  M. George Craford obtained a B.A. degree in physics from the University of Iowa in 1961 and a Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Illinois in 1967. Craford began his professional career in 1967 as a research physicist at Monsanto Chemical Company in St. Louis, Missouri. He advanced to the level of technical director of the Monsanto Electronics Division in 1974. In 1979 Craford joined the Hewlett Packard Company in Palo Alto, California. He is currently compound semiconductor development and production manager of the Optoelectronics Division, responsible for the technology and processes for manufacturing visible light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

  Craford is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has received the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Award, the Holonyak Award of the Optical Society of America, the Welker Award of the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors and the Electronics Division Award of the Electrochemical Society.

  Craford's research has been mainly focused on the development of optoelectronics materials and devices using a variety of compound semiconductor materials. He is most well-known for his contributions to the development of nitrogen-doped GaAsP technology for yellow and red-orange LEDs developed at Monsanto in the early 1970s. This became one of the dominant commercial LED technologies. It has for many years been common in products such as digital clocks, radio displays, electronic measurement devices and a variety of other commercial products.

  At Hewlett Packard, Craford's group has maintained a leadership position in LED performance and production technology with the introduction of a variety of technologies including AlInGaP devices, which have better luminous efficiencies than incandescent lamps. These devices are becoming widely used in applications where energy saving and reliability are a key factor, such as traffic signals, and in applications where design flexibility is important, such as exterior automobile lighting.
  
  At the 1999 MRS Fall Meeting, Craford delivered an awards talk entitled "Visible Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs): Past, Present, and Very Bright Future."

  
  
• Stephen Forrest Princeton University (1999)
  "For pioneering contributions to the growth and optoelectronic applications of organic semiconductor thin films."
  

  Stephen Forrest graduated from the University of California with a B.A. degree in physics in 1972, and from the University of Michigan with M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics in 1974 and 1979, respectively. From there he went to Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill) where he did both fundamental and applied research and development of photodetectors for use in long wavelength optical communications systems. In 1982 he became supervisor of the Integrated Optoelectronic Devices and Circuits group at Bell Laboratories where he worked on arrays of emitters and detectors and integrated optical receivers.

  In 1985 Forrest joined the faculty of the departments of electrical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California where he continued his research on optoelectronic integrated circuits, as well as on a new class of optoelectronic materials: small-molecular-weight organic semiconductors. From 1989 to 1992 Forrest served as the director of the National Center for Integrated Photonic Technology: a consortium of five universities including USC, Columbia, Kent State University, MIT and UCLA.

  In 1992 Forrest joined Princeton University as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and the Princeton Materials Institute, and as director of Princeton's Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials (POEM). Since 1997 he has served as the chairman of the department of electrical engineering at Princeton. Forrest has served as associate editor to the Journal of Quantum Electronics and Photonics Technology Letters, has served on the OSA Technical Council, and is on the LEOS Board of Governors. In 1996-97 he was the recipient of the IEEE/LEOS Distinguished Lecturer Award, and in 1998 he was co recipient of the Intellectual Property Owners National Distinguished Inventor Award as well as the Thomas Alva Edison Award for innovations in multicolor organic LEDs.

  He is a member of the APS, MRS and the OSA, and is a fellow of the IEEE. Forrest is the author of about 250 papers in refereed professional journals and holds about 40 patents primarily in the areas of organic thin-film materials and devices and III-V semiconductor photonic materials and devices.
  
  At the 1999 MRS Fall Meeting, Forrest delivered an awards talk entitled "Science and Technology at the Nanometer Scale Using Vacuum Deposited Organic Thin Films."

  
  
• William L. Johnson California Institute of Technology (1998)
  "For the development and fundamental understanding of bulk metallic glass forming alloys"
  

  William L. Johnson is cited for his development of bulk metallic glass-forming alloys, the fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics and kinetics which control glass formation and crystallization of the glass-forming liquids, and the application of these materials in engineering.
  
  Johnson is the Ruben and Donna Mettler Professor of Materials Science, Engineering and Applied Science at California Institute of Technology. During his 20 years on the Caltech faculty, he has supervised over 45 doctoral students and 20 post-doctoral scientists. He has delivered numerous invited presentations at conferences worldwide, and has served as a consultant to NASA, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense, the National Science Foundation and numerous companies. He was the winner of the 1996 Hume Rothery Award of the TMS/AIME and was also awarded the 1995 ISMANAM (International Symposium on Amorphous, Nanocrystalline, and Metastable Materials) Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to the field. He was the 1988 recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Distinguished Scientist Fellowship Award and spent a visiting semester at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He is a member of the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS). He has served as an associate editor of the Journal of Materials Research, as editor of Applied Physics Letters, and on the editorial board of the International Journal of Rapid Solidification.
  
  Johnson received his bachelor's degree in physics from Hamilton College and his Ph.D. in applied physics from Caltech. He has authored or coauthored over 250 scientific papers in the archival literature, including eight chapters to books and several review articles dealing with metastable materials, metallic glasses, the melting transition, superconducting materials and materials processing. He is an inventor or coinventor on 17 issued and pending U.S. patents.
  
  At the 1998 MRS Fall Meeting, Johnson delivered an awards talk entitled "Bulk Glass-Forming Metallic Alloys—Science and Technology."

  
  
• Shuji Nakamura, Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. (1997)
  "For the development of lattice-mismatched GaN-based heteroepitaxy and its application to the creation of blue and green light-emitting diodes and short wavelength laser diodes."
  

  Shuji Nakamura joined Nichia Chemical Industries, Ltd., in 1979, and has been head of the company's department of research and development since 1993. He is responsible for all aspects of the III-V nitride research for blue/green light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes (LDs).
  
  Nakamura received his bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the University of Tokushima in Japan. He started III-V nitride research in 1989 and has developed: a blue LED with a luminous intensity as high as 2cd using III-V nitride materials (1993); high-brightness single-quantum-well-structure blue and green LEDs with luminous intensities about 100 times higher than those of conventional blue SiC LEDs and green GaP LEDs (1995); and a bluish-purple laser diode using III-V nitride materials for the first time (1995).
  
  Among Nakamura's numerous awards are the Nikkei BP Engineering Award, the Phosphor Award, the SID (Society for Information Display) Special Recognition Award, the Japanese Society of Applied Physics Paper Award, the LEOS (Lasers and Electro-Optics Society) Engineering Achievement Award and the Nishina Memorial Award.
  
  At the 1997 MRS Fall Meeting, Nakamura delivered an awards talk entitled "III-Nitride and Optoelectronic Devices."

  
  
• Jerry D. Tersoff, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1996)

  "For seminal contributions to the theory of strain relaxation in thin films."
  
  Jerry Tersoff is being recognized for his seminal contributions to theoretical materials physics. The most recent of these is the theory on strain relaxation in thin films.

  Tersoff's work has had greater impact on the enormous semiconductor growth community than any other theorist in this country or abroad. He is one of the most trusted and influential individuals in the general area of electronic theory and its applications.
  
  At the 1996 MRS Fall Meeting, Tersoff delivered an awards talk entitled "Strain Relaxation and the Morphology of Thin Films."

  
  
• Federico Capasso AT&T Bell Laboratories (1995)
  "For seminal contributions to compositionally graded materials, using bandgap engineering, and their innovative applications in electronics and optoelectronics."
  
  At the 1995 MRS Fall Meeting, Capasso delivered an awards talk entitled "Bandgap Engineering of Compositionally Graded Semiconductors: Physics and Applications to Electronics and Photonics."
  
  
• Rudolf M. Tromp, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1995)
  "For pioneering experiments on the role of atomic structure, surface stress, and surfactants in heteroepitaxial growth."
  
  At the 1995 MRS Fall Meeting, Tromp delivered an awards talk entitled "Si(001) Homoepitaxial Growth."
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Max G. Lagally, University of Wisconsin-Madison (1994)
  "For innovative development of STM as a quantitative probe of the microscopic mechanisms of crystal growth and ordering at surfaces."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Kenneth S. Suslick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1994)
  "For incisive studies of chemical effects of ultrasound and the use of sonochemistry in synthesis of unusual inorganic materials."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Wolfgang Kraätschmer, Max-Planck Institute Kernphysik (1993)
  "For the discovery of a method to produce macroscopic quantities of fullerenes, and for elucidating their properties."
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Donald R. Huffman, University of Arizona (1993)

  "For the discovery of a method to produce macroscopic quantities of fullerenes and for elucidating their properties."

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• L. Eric Cross, The Pennsylvania State University (1992)
  

  "In recognition of his leadership and vision in the atomic scale engineering of relaxor ferroelectric materials as the prototype of self-assembling nanocomposites."

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Stephen J. Pennycook, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1993)

  "For the development and application of incoherent (Z-contrast) imaging in the scanning transmission electron microscope for direct determination of the atomic scale structure and chemistry of materials and interfaces."

  
  
  
  
  
  
• Bernard S. Meyerson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (1991)

  "In recognition of his dynamic research leading to the fabrication of high speed heterojunction bipolar transistors."

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Shigeyuki Somiya, Nishi Tokyo University (1991)

  "In recognition of his innovation and energy in pioneering the field of hydrothermal synthesis of ceramic materials."

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Arthur J. Freeman, Northwestern University (1990)

  "In recognition of his pioneering achievements in the field of monolayer and low dimensional magnetism."

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Duward F. Shriver, Northwestern University (1990)

  "In recognition of his seminal work in the synthesis, characterization, understanding and application of polymer based solid electrolyte materials."