Prize Recipient


Recipient Picture

Naomi Halas
Rice University

Citation:

"For seminal contributions to our understanding of the photophysics of low dimensional material systems, revealing the rich optical properties of plasmons, excitons, and electrons in confined geometries."

Background:

Prof. Naomi Halas obtained her undergraduate degree in chemistry (1980) from La Salle University in Philadelphia and her PhD (1987) in Physics from Bryn Mawr College. She was a graduate research fellow at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights and a postdoctoral fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, NJ. She joined the Rice University faculty in 1990. She is currently the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, and holds appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and Bioengineering. She is best known for the invention of tunable plasmonic nanoparticles, for studies of light-matter interactions at the nanoscale based on precisely designed resonant nanostructures, and for applications of tunable plasmonic nanoparticles in biomedicine and solar steam generation. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the APS, MRS, OSA, IEEE, SPIE, and AAAS. She is an associate editor of Nano Letters.


Selection Committee:

Joseph Orenstein, Chair; D. Basov; D. Drew; G. Blumberg; D. Tanner; M. Aronson