Ralph Nuzzo

Ralph G. Nuzzo, born February 23, 1954 in Paterson, New Jersey is an American chemist and professor. Nuzzo is a prominent researcher in the chemistry of materials, including processes that occur at surfaces and interfaces. His work has led to new techniques for fabricating and manipulating materials at the nano scale level, including functional device structures for microelectronics, optics and chemical sensing.

Nuzzo was a pioneer in the development of methods of self-assembled monolayers that have led to entirely new areas of surface chemistry with important extensions into physics, biology and materials, and with numerous applications ranging from bio-sensors to advanced electronics. His work has made important contributions to soft lithography - a low cost alternative to conventional photo-lithography for patterning circuits on microchips.

Nuzzo co-authored the paper on the "use of principles of physical organic chemistry to create functional surfaces based on self-assembled monolayers (SAMs)." The report is one of the "most highly cited papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society history.

Professor Nuzzo received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Rutgers University in 1976 and his Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. After completing his graduate studies he accepted a position at Bell Laboratories, then a part of AT&T, where he held the title of Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in Materials Research. He is currently the G. L. Clark Professor of Chemistry, and a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• Fellow of the AVS, 2007
• World Innovation Foundation, Fellow, 2005
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow, 2005
• ACS Arthur Adamson Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Surface Chemistry in 2003
• Senior Editor of Langmuir
• Distinguished Technical Staff Award, Bell Laboratories
• Fellow of the American Chemical Society, 2011