Robert Cava

Robert Joseph Cava (* 1951) is an American chemist and materials scientist with solid-state chemistry is concerned ( strongly electronically correlated materials ). He is a professor at Princeton University.

Cava received in 1974 his bachelor's and master's degree in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1978 he was there his doctorate at BJ Wuensch on ceramics. 1979 to 1996 he was at Bell Laboratories, from 1985 as a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, and in 1996 he was a professor at Princeton. Since 2006 he has been there Russell William Moore Professor of Chemistry.

He was a visiting scientist at the Danish Nuclear Research Center in Risø, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, at the Laboratory of Crystallography in Grenoble and at the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto.

He is especially known for the search for new high temperature oxide superconductors, starting with the copper oxide superconductors in the late 1980s up to the novel superconductors, iron pnictides from the end of the 2000s. He is also looking for new metal superconductors, dielectrics, thermoelectric and magnetoresistive materials, transparent conductors and frustrated low-dimensional magnets and and generally for new solid-state materials with transition metals and rare-earth alloys with unique electronic properties. He also works on topological insulators.

He has published over 500 works (2003) and holds 15 patents.

In 2012 he received the Linus Pauling Award and the 2011 Humboldt Research Award and the American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001. In 1996 he received the Matthias price for new superconducting materials