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Pulickel Ajayan

Pulickel Ajayan

Functional Materials for Energy | Materials at Low Dimensions

CONTACT

(713) 348-5904 | ajayan@rice.edu

Research Areas
Research Description

Dr. Ajayan's research focuses on the development of functional nanostructured materials for variety of applications. His research group looks at the materials science and engineering aspects of these novel materials with three different focused application areas, nanomaterials in energy generation and storage, multifunctional composites, nano-enabled bio-mimetic systems and nanoelectronics, nanosensors and active nanosystems.

Biography

Pulickel Ajayan is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering, Materials Science and Nanotechnology at Rice University. His research interests include the application of nanomaterials for energy generation and storage, the synthesis and characterization of nano-based composites and nano-enabled bio-mimetic systems and the study of nanoelectronics, nanosensors and active nanosystems. Ajayan is a pioneer in the field of carbon nanotechnology, having been actively involved in the earliest studies of carbon nanotubes during his time at NEC Corp. in Japan. He has published more than 325 journal papers. His numerous awards include the Senior Humboldt Prize, the Materials Research Society's MRS Medal, Top 50 recognition in Scientific American, the Burton Award from the Microscopic Society of America and the Hadfield Medal for the outstanding student metallurgist in India. Ajayan is a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary member of both the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the Materials Research Society of India. He has served as a distinguished visiting professor at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Hefei; a distinguished guest professor in materials sciences at Tsinghua University; and a visiting professor at ISIS, University of Louis Pasteur in France. Ajayan has been part of two Guinness World Records, one for the creation of the smallest brush and the other for creating the darkest material. After three years of post-doctoral experience at NEC Corp. in Japan, Ajayan 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.

Recent Publications