| Pulickel Ajayan | |
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Ajayan in his office at Rice University
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| Born | 15 July 1962 |
| Fields | Materials science and Nanotechnology |
| Institutions | Rice University |
| Alma mater | Northwestern University Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University |
| Known for | Nanotechnology |
Pulickel Madhavapanicker Ajayan (Malayalam: പുളിക്കല് മാധവപ്പണിക്കര് അജയന്), known as P. M. Ajayan, is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering at Rice University.[1] His primary appointment at Rice University is in the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science department but also holds joint appointments with the department of Chemistry and department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Prior to joining Rice, he was the Henry Burlage Professor of Material Sciences and Engineering and the director of the NYSTAR interconnect focus center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute until 2007. Known for his relaxed attitude and liberal thinking, he has broad interests ranging from science and technology to poetry.[2] He is married to Poornima Ajayan and has two daughters, Anakha and Ahi.
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Ajayan's early education was in Kerala, India. Till the sixth standard, he studied in a government school in Kodungallur, after which he moved to Loyola School, Thiruvananthapuram, India, a high school he has credited for making a strong impact on him, and for making him "realize that learning is the most exciting thing one can ever befriend".[3] He graduated from Loyola in 1977. In 1985, Ajayan graduated at the top of his class with a B.Tech. degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. In 1989, he earned a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Afterwards he spent three years as a post-doc at NEC corporation, Japan, two years as a researcher at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Orsay, France, and one year at the Max-Planck Institute fur Metallforschung, Stuttgart, Germany.
Ajayan is a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology.[4] His PhD work (1989) involved the characterization of gold nanoparticles on oxide substrates and their phase instabilities. He was involved in the early development of carbon nanotubes. From 1991 onwards, at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, he worked with Sumio Iijima and Thomas Ebbesen and published some of the early works in carbon nanotubes.[5] During the past two decades he has published more than 350 papers on various aspects of carbon nanostructures, mostly on nanotubes and recently on graphene and other layered materials such as boron nitride. Ajayan’s research interests are broad, focusing on nanomaterials development for a variety of applications such as energy storage, composites, electronics and sensors. His publications have earned nearly 25,000 citations and a h-index of 82 until mid-2011. He has to his credit, two Guinness World Records for creating the smallest brush[6] and the darkest material.[7] Ajayan's team created the darkest material known to man, a carpet of carbon nanotubes, that reflects only 0.045% of the light.[8] In August 2007, he was in the news for creating an energy storage device on a piece of paper, called the paper battery. In a brief interview with Discover Magazine, Ajayan stated he believes the paper battery will have many important future applications in industry and medicine.[9] Most recently, the research group created materials capable of effectively removing contaminants from water by coating the sand with carbon.[10]
Ajayan’s present research interests include nanotechnology enabled energy storage devices (battery, supercapacitor and hybrid devices), nanocomposites,[11] layered materials, 3D nanostructured materials, and smart material systems. Apart from leading a research group (~30-35 people, including post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students, and international visiting scholars), he focuses on teaching and lecturing around the world on nanotechnology. He regularly serves on the advisory board of several materials and nanotechnology journals, nanotechnology startups and international conferences. In his role as an academic at Rice and RPI, Ajayan has been a major promoter of nanotechnology,[12] teaching various interdisciplinary courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, emphasizing the changes occurring in the science and engineering curriculum. Constantly traveling to expand the field, Ajayan’s group has a large number of collaborators worldwide and he spends a good amount of time abroad and inside the United States. He has visiting Professor positions at various prestigious Universities around the world, such as Tsinghua University (Beijing, China), Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India) and Shinshu University (Japan). He was a visiting Professor at ISIS, Strasbourg, France for several months during 2003 and a Helmoltz-Humboldt prize winner and frequent visitor at the Institute of Nanotechnology in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany during 2007-2010.