Pulickel M. Ajayan

Rice University

Pulickel M. Ajayan has been a pioneer in the area of nanotechnology. His Ph.D. work focused on structural instabilities in nanoparticles and their dynamic behavior. He was involved in pioneering early work in the development of carbon nanotubes.

Over the past two decades he has published more than five hundred papers, earning nearly forty thousand citations and an h-index of 100 based on the ISI citation data. His research focus has been on the materials science and applications of nanomaterials and their structure-property correlations. His work has covered diverse areas of nanomaterials including nanoparticles, nanotubes, two-dimensional materials including graphene and beyond and design of nanocomposite and energy storage materials.

Presently he is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson professor of engineering at Rice University in Houston. He is the founding chair of the department of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University. He is affiliated with several other universities around the world as visiting professor and has given over three hundred and fifty invited talks at various venues and conferences. He supports a large group of students, post-docctoral fellows and visitors and runs several federally and industrially funded programs.

He is the recipient of awards such as the Spiers memorial award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (London), MRS medal, Alexander von Humboldt-Helmoltz senior award, and several endowed lectures. He is recipient of two Guinness book of world records. He received Docteur Honoris Causa from the Universite Catholique de of Louvain in 2014. He has also been recognized as distinguished alumni by his Alma Mater Banaras Hindu University and the department of materials science at Northwestern University.
 

Appearances