Nano-engineered materials: opportunities and challenges

The talk will focus on approaches used to engineer nanomaterials for applications. Carbon nanostructures, including carbon nanotubes and graphene, will be used as prime examples to demonstrate opportunities and challenges that exist in nanoscale engineering and nanomaterials development. The last couple of decades have seen fascinating advances in nanotechnology with its manifestations in many areas of science and technology. Several exciting developments in recent years allow us to think about strategies we can follow to develop the next generation of materials using nanoengineering. The talk will focus on various aspects of nanotechnology such as synthesis, assembly, nanoscale junctions, hybrid nanostructures, nanocomposites, membranes, functional materials etc. The inherent opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in developing nanomaterials based technologies will be discussed.

Biography:
Professor Ajayan earned his B. Tech in metallurgical engineering from Banaras Hindu University in 1985 and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University in 1989. After three years of post-doctoral experience at NEC Corporation in Japan, he spent two years as a research scientist at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Orsay in France and nearly a year and a half as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Metallforschung, Stuttgart in Germany. In 1997, he joined the materials science and engineering faculty at Rensselaer as an Assistant Professor and was the Henri Burlage chair Professor in Engineering until 2007. He joined the mechanical engineering and materials science department of Rice university, as the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering from July 2007. Professor Ajayan's research interests include synthesis and structure-property relations of nanostructures and nanocomposites, materials science and applications of nanomaterials and phase stability in nanoscale systems. He is one of the pioneers in the field of carbon nanotubes and was involved in the early work on the topic along with the NEC group. He has published one book and 330 journal papers with more than ~23,500 citations and an h-index of 78. He has given more than 280 invited talks including several keynote and plenary lectures in more than 20 countries. Ajayan has received several awards including the Senior Humboldt Prize, 2006 MRS medal, Scientific American 50 recognition in 2006, RPI senior research award (2003), the Burton award from the microscopic society of America (1997) and the Hadfield medal for the outstanding metallurgist in India (1985). He has been elected as a fellow of AAAS and to the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He is on the advisory editorial board of several materials science and nanotechnology journals and on the boards of several nanotech companies.