People

Principal Investigators

Harry A. Atwater, Jr.
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Harry A. Atwater is currently Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests center around multidisciplinary research on photovoltaic and optoelectronic devices, including nanostructured photovoltaic cells, ultrahigh efficiency compound semiconductor solar cells, subwavelength-scale photonic devices based on plasmon excitation, propagation and localization, nanocrystal electronic and optoelectronic devices, including silicon nanocrystal nonvolatile memories and LEDs, and ferroelectric and piezoelectric active thin film materials and devices. Professor Atwater is founder and chief technical advisor for Aonex Corporation, and he has consulted extensively for industry and government, and has actively served the materials research community in various capacities, including Material Research Society Meeting Chair (1997), Materials Research Society President (2000), AVS Electronic Materials and Processing Division Chair (1999), a Gordon Conference Chair (2001). He currently serves as Director of Caltech’s Center for Science and Engineering of Materials (an NSF MRSEC).

Harry B. Gray
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Harry B. Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and the Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology. His main research interests center on the electronic structures and reactions of inorganic complexes, inorganic spectroscopy and photochemistry, and bioinorganic chemistry, with emphasis on understanding electron transfer in proteins. For his contributions to chemistry, which include over 700 papers and 17 books, he has received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan (1986); the National Academy of Sciences Award in Chemical Sciences (2003); the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry (2004); the Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2004); six national awards from the American Chemical Society, including the Priestley Medal (1991); and 16 honorary doctorates. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Philosophical Society; a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; and the Royal Society of Great Britain. He was California Scientist of the Year in 1988.

Sossina M. Haile
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Sossina M. Haile is Professor of Materials Science and of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. Before assuming her present position at Caltech in 1996, Haile was a member of the faculty at the University of Washington. Her research broadly encompasses solid state ionic materials and devices, with particular focus on fuel cells. She has established a new class of fuel cells based on solid acid electrolytes, and demonstrated record power densities for solid oxide fuel cells. Haile has published over 80 papers on these and related topics and has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences. In 1992 she was awarded a National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foudation. Her other major awards include the 2001 J. Bruce Wagner, Jr. Young Investigator Award of the Electrochemical Society.

Nathan S. Lewis
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Nathan S. Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, has been on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology since 1988, and has served as Professor since 1991. He has also served as the Principal Investigator of the Beckman Institute Molecular Materials Resource Center at Caltech since 1992. From 1981 to 1986, he was on the faculty at Stanford, as an assistant professor from 1981 to 1985 and a tenured Associate Professor from 1986 to 1988. Dr. Lewis received his Ph.D in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Lewis has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and a Presidential Young Investigator. He received the Fresenius Award in 1990 and the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1991. He has published over 200 papers and has supervised approximately 50 graduate students and postdoctoral associates. His research interests include semiconductor electrochemistry and photoelectrochemisry, scanning tunneling microscopy of organic monolayers, and artificial olfactory systems using arrays of chemical sensors.

Staff

April Neidholdt