Alan J Heeger

Alan Jay Heeger (Sioux City, Iowa, January 22, 1936) is an American physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000.

Biography

He graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1957, and in 1961 received a Ph.D. in Physical Sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, and until 1982 his career was closely linked to this Academic Institution, where he held the positions of Assistant Professor, Tenured Professor, Director of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter and, between 1981 and 1982, vice-rector for research. That same year he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara as Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute for Organic Polymers and Solids at the same University. In 1990 he founded, together with his colleague Paul Smith, the UNIAX Corporation, of which he is president and director of research, and which was acquired by DuPont.

Scientific research

During his career he has published numerous chemical articles on materials, especially on inorganic molecules. His research on the conductive capacity of inorganic atoms and his literary applications have earned him three awards, including the Balzan Prize, the John Scout Prize, and the Oliver E. Buckley Prize for Concentrated Physical Matter. In 2000, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the knowledge and development of the science of electrically conductive inorganic polymers, also known as "synthetic metals", an award he shared with Alan G. MacDiarmid from New Zealand and Hideki Shirakawa from Japan. His theory of atoms postulated that several monomers made up an atom.