Halas named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry

By Patrick Kurp
Special to the Rice News

Naomi Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice, has been named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

To be eligible for RSC fellowship, a nominee must have made “a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science.”

In February, the RSC honored Halas with the 2019 Spiers Memorial Award during its Faraday Discussion meeting in London, recognizing her “pioneering research at the intersection of optics and nanoscience and the demonstration of optical property manipulation by nanoparticle geometry.”

Founded in 1848, the RSC is a 54,000-member professional organization with some 1,600 fellows and foreign members, including about 80 Nobel laureates. Each year as many as 52 fellows and 10 foreign members are elected from a pool of some 700 candidates who must be nominated by two current fellows.

As a pioneer in the development of light-activated nanoparticles, Halas is the first Rice faculty member to be elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering for research done at Rice. Her discoveries have diverse applications in cancer treatment, optoelectronics, photocatalysis, chemical sensing, solar-powered distillation and steam production, and off-grid water treatment.

Halas has joint appointments at Rice in the departments of chemistry, bioengineering, physics and astronomy, and materials science and nanoengineering, and is director of the Smalley-Curl Institute.

According to Google Scholar, Halas’ publications have been cited more than 86,400 times and her h-index is 142. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Materials Research Society, the Optical Society, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

– Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.