Naomi J. Halas

Dr. Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, and Professor in the Departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Bioengineering. Her research focuses on manipulating light in new ways, by designing and creating nanoscale objects for that purpose, then applying them to applications of societal and technological impact. She was a graduate research fellow at IBM Research, Yorktown, NY, served as a postdoctoral associate at AT&T Bell Laboratories and joined the Rice faculty in 1990. Halas is one of the pioneering researchers in the field of plasmonics, creating the concept of the “tunable plasmon” and inventing a family of nanoparticles with resonances spanning the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum. Halas pursues fundamental studies of coupled plasmonic systems as well as applications of plasmonics in biomedicine, optoelectronics, chemical sensing and photocatalysis.   She is author of more than 375 refereed publications, has more than 25 issued patents, has presented more than 600 invited talks, and has been cited more than 80,000 times (H=144 on Web of Science, over 100,000 citations and H=163 on Google Scholar). She is co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, a Houston-based company developing photothermal therapies for cancer based on her nanoparticles, currently in clinical trials, and also co-founder of Syzygy Plasmonics, a Houston-based company combining plasmonic photocatalysts developed in her laboratory with their own proprietary LED-based chemical reactor for clean energy applications. She is a recipient of the American Physical Society Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids and the Julius Lilienfeld Prize, the Willis E. Lamb Award, the American Chemical Society Colloid Prize, and the Wood Prize of the Optical Society of America. She is a Fellow of OSA, APS, SPIE, IEEE, MRS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Inventors. She has been a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow of the U.S. Department of Defense and an advisor to the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences (US) and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK).