Prize Recipient

Thirumalai Venkatesan
National University of Singapore

Citation:

"For his exemplary scientific career in research, industrial leadership, and guidance of new generations of physicists in the creation new ventures by innovation."

Background:

Prof. Venkatesan spent 17 years with Bell Labs and Bellcore in various capacities before becoming a Professor of ECE and Physics at the Superconductivity Center at University of Maryland for the next 17 years. In between he was the founding director of the surface modification Labs at Rutgers University and over the last 4 years he has established a multi disciplinary Nano Institute at the National University of Singapore where he is the Director. He is the inventor of the pulsed laser deposition process and has published over 500 papers in the field of oxide films and hetero structures and has been a pioneer in the field of Oxide Electronics. He is among the top 100 most cited Physicists (global rank of 66) with a Hirsch index of ~ 80. He founded Neocera in 1989 and this company is globally recognized for PLD systems and magnetic field imaging magma systems. His students/ researchers (about 10 of them) have founded close to 15 different companies. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of the World Innovations Forum, and winner of the Bellcore Award of excellence and has been a member of the Physics Policy Committee in Washington DC. He got his PhD from The City University of New York in 1977 and his MS and BS degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur and Kharagpur respectively. His current field of interest is electronic and magnetic properties of nano structured oxide films and interfaces.

Selection Committee:

Joseph Heremans, Chair; R. Doering; J. Hollenhorst; B.S. Meyerson; D. Morelli