Mark Hersam named 2014 MacArthur Fellow

Mark Hersam (Courtesy John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation/ Creative Commons

SPIE Fellow and materials scientist Mark Hersam this week was named one of the 21 Fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for 2014. Hersam is a professor at Northwestern University and the director of the university's Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

Hersam's research team works with carbon nanotubes and graphene, developing nanomaterials for use in information technology, biotechnology, energy, and personalized health monitoring electronics. The MacArthur award, which comes with a stipend of $625,000, will allow his research team to work with new materials created from other elements.

Hersam serves on the program committee for the conference on Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene, and Associated Devices at SPIE Optics + Photonics and is an author of several papers in the SPIE Digital Library. Among them:

• "Tuning the optical properties of carbon nanotube solutions using amphiphilic self-assembly"
• "Optical absorption and transient photobleaching in solutions of surfactant-encapsulated and DNA-wrapped single-walled carbon nanotubes"
• "Exciton annihilation and dephasing dynamics in semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes".

He co-authored a chapter in the 2013 SPIE Press book The Wonder of Nanotechnology: Quantum Optoelectronic Devices and Applications, edited by SPIE Fellow Manijeh Razeghi and Nobel laureates Leo Esaki and Klaus von Klitzing.

The MacArthur Foundation commented in recognizing Hersam: "Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws on techniques from materials science, physics, engineering, and chemistry, Hersam has established himself as a leading experimentalist in the area of hybrid organic-inorganic materials, with a focus on the study of the electrical and optical properties of carbon and related nanomaterials."

See Hersam describe his research in a MacArthur Foundation video.