Keynote Speaker
Dr. Naomi Halas
Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy
Director, Laboratory for Nanophotonics
Nanoengineering, Plasmonics, Nanophotonics
- B.A. (1980) La Salle College, magna cum laude
- M.A. (1984) Bryn Mawr College
- Ph.D. (1986) Bryn Mawr College
- D.Sc. (2007) La Salle University
281 Brockman Hall
ECE Department
Rice University
6100 Main St MS 378
Houston, TX 77005-1892
halas@rice.edu
Naomi Halas was a graduate research fellow at IBM Research, Yorktown, NY, served as a postdoctoral associate at AT&T Bell Laboratories and joined the Rice faculty in 1990. Halas is one of the pioneering researchers in the field of plasmonics, creating the concept of the “tunable plasmon” and inventing a family of nanoparticles with resonances spanning the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum. Halas pursues fundamental studies of coupled plasmonic systems as well as applications of plasmonics in biomedicine, optoelectronics, chemical sensing, photocatalysis, and most recently in solar energy, with a novel ‘solar steam’ technology. She is author of more than 250 refereed publications, has more than fifteen issued patents, has presented more than 450 invited talks, and has been cited more than 30,000 times (H=87 on Web of Science, H=97 on Google Scholar). She is co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, a Houston-based company developing photothermal therapies for cancer and other diseases based on her nanoparticles, currently in multiple clinical trials, and cofounder of Eureka Sun, a startup pursuing commercial applications of solar steam generation. Halas was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, the National Academy of Sciences in 2013 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She is a recipient of the American Physical Society 2014 Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids. She is a Fellow of six professional societies: OSA, APS, SPIE, IEEE, MRS, and the the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow of the U.S. Department of Defense, an advisor to the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation, and advisor to the Director of the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Chemical Physics Letters and Laser and Photonics Reviews, and an Associate Editor of Nano Letters.