Prof. Richard W. Siegel Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Richard W. Siegel has been the Robert W. Hunt Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since June 1995, and was Department Head from 1995 to 2000. In April 2001, Dr. Siegel became the founding Director of the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center at the Institute and, from September... read more2001 until the end of 2013, was also the founding Director of the US National Science Foundation Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures. He was graduated from Williams College in 1958 with an AB degree in physics, received an MS degree in physics in 1960 and a PhD degree in metallurgy in 1965 from the University of Illinois in Urbana. After two years of postdoctoral materials research at Cornell University, Siegel served on the faculty of the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1966-76). He was a research scientist in the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory from 1974 to 1995, serving most of that time as group leader and research program manager in the areas of metal physics or defects in metals.
Dr. Siegel has been a visiting professor in Germany, Israel, India, Switzerland, Japan and China, and has been active in many professional organizations. Most notably he was a member (2003-09) of the Nanotechnology Technical Advisory Group of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He also chaired the World Technology Evaluation Center worldwide study of nanostructure science and technology (1996-98) for the US government that led in 2001 to the US National Nanotechnology Initiative. Siegel earlier served on the US National Materials Advisory Board Committee on Materials With Sub-Micron Sized Microstructures and was co-chairman of the Study Panel on Clusters and Cluster-Assembled Materials for the US Department of Energy.
Dr. Siegel has studied the properties of defects in metals, atomic diffusion, and the synthesis, processing, characterization, properties, and applications of nanostructured ceramics, metals, composites, and biomaterials. His research activities have garnered over $60 million in funding from federal, state, industry, and private sponsors. He has authored or coauthored over 300 articles and patents, edited ten books, and presented more than 500 invited lectures. Siegel’s work is highly cited with more than 12,000 citations to date (h=59). He was a founding Editor of Nanostructured Materials, an associate editor of Materials Letters for 25 years, and is presently a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and the Journal of Metastable and Nanocrystalline Materials. Siegel is a founder and Director of Nanophase Technologies Corporation, a publicly held manufacturing company; his early work with them was recognized by a US Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer. His contributions to the field of material science have been recognized by multiple awards and honours from societies around the world, most recently Dr. Siegel was named a Fellow of the Materials Research Society in 2010 and elected in 2015 to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.