Rice alum shares million-dollar Kavli Prize in nanoscience

Rice alum shares million-dollar Kavli Prize in nanoscience

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Rice alum Louis E. Brus ’65 is a co-recipient of the first Kavli Prize in nanoscience — a million-dollar award that complements the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

Brus, now the Samuel Latham Mitchill Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, shared the Kavli Prize with Sumio Iijima of Meijo University in Japan for their respective discoveries of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots, and carbon nanotubes.

	LOUIS BRUS

The Kavli Prize winners were announced May 28 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway, and at the first World Science Festival in New York. The award is intended to recognize outstanding scientific research, promote public understanding of scientists and their work and foster international collaboration among researchers.

According to the academy, major advances that have been predicted in electronics, the environment, biomedicine and energy would not have been possible without the contributions Brus and Iijima made in explaining the unusual properties of particles so small that electronic motion is confined to zero or one dimension.

Brus came to Rice in 1961 on a Naval Reserves Officer Training Corps scholarship. His NROTC activities at sea in between school years forced him to postpone doing a summer research project until after his senior year, when he worked with the late Professor John Margrave, who specialized in physical inorganic chemistry. Brus graduated magna cum laude in 1965 with a B.A. in chemical physics.

“I was a simple high school boy when I came to Rice, and when I left I was a dedicated scientist,” Brus said. “Rice was a great place for me. I learned to love history and English literature as well as science. I remember so clearly my undergraduate professors — Zevi Salsburg, John Margrave, B. Frank Jones, George Holmes Richter, Calvin Class and Dean Masterson. I took a senior math class from Frank Ryan, who was starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns at the time. I worked in Ken Pitzer’s lab briefly as a junior.”

After Brus left Rice, his interest in physics and chemistry led him to doctoral studies at Columbia, where he received a Ph.D. in chemical physics in 1969. After serving as a lieutenant and scientific staff officer at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and as a distinguished member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., Brus joined the faculty at Columbia in 1996, and he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

Brus’ work on quantum dots that helped establish him as one of the leading researchers in nanoscience began in the early 1980s when he studied liquids at room temperature. A key discovery occurred in 1983 when Brus observed how conductivity changed with the particle size of materials.

Brus is best known for creating the interdisciplinary field of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals through original discovery, theoretical modeling, chemical synthesis of purified samples and studies of the spectroscopy of individual nanocrystals. His research has played a leading role in developing worldwide interest in colloidal nanomaterials (quantum dots) with controlled size-dependent properties. The fluorescence wavelength of the quantum dots depends on their size; this property, along with their long-time stability, makes the nanocrystals suitable for dynamic studies of molecular interactions and reactions in biological systems.

Other applications of Brus’ research include binding colloidal nanocrystals to tumor-targeting antibodies or as drug-delivery agents for targeting, imaging and treating tumor cells, and using quantum dots in photovoltaic cells to make more efficient and cheaper forms of solar energy.

In addition to nanoscience, Kavli Prizes were awarded for neuroscience and astrophysics. These three inaugural awards are a partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research and will be issued biannually. The Kavli Foundation, based in Oxnard, Calif., was established in 2000 by Norwegian-born physicist Fred Kavli for the advancement of science that benefits humanity.