James R. Heath (born 1962) is an American chemist and the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
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Heath graduated with a degree in Chemistry in 1984 from Baylor University in Texas where he was an active member of the NoZe Brotherhood. He completed his Ph.D. in Physics and Chemistry from Rice University in 1988.
From 1988 to 1991, he was a Miller Research Fellow at the Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley. From 1991 to 1994, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown, New York. He joined the faculty at UCLA in 1994 and became Professor of Chemistry in 1997.
Heath is known for publishing an architecture demonstration of molecular computers, or moletronics. In moletronics, single molecules serve as switches, "quantum wires" a few atoms thick serve as wiring, and the hardware is synthesized chemically from the bottom up. It was published in the summer of 1999 by Heath, J. Fraser Stoddart (Chemist at UCLA) and their collaborators in the journal Science.
When Heath was at Rice University, he ran the experimental apparatus that generated the first C60 molecules and, ultimately, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the three senior members of the collaboration: Robert F. Curl and Richard E. Smalley of Rice University and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex.
Heath has received several awards and honours for his research. He was awarded the 2000 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. He became a fellow of American Physical Society in 1999. In 2009, Heath was named one of the seven most powerful innovators of the world by Forbes magazine.