Alan J. Heeger

Alan Jay Heeger ( born January 22, 1936 in Sioux City, Iowa) is an American chemist and physicist. Along with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and development of conductive polymers in 2000.

Life

Heeger studied at the University of Nebraska (Bachelor 1957) and received his doctorate in 1961 at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1962 he was assistant professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became Associate Professor in 1964 and Professor in 1967. 1974-1981 he was the Director of The Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter. He has taught since 1982 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first as Professor of Physics, in 1987 as professor of materials science (Professor of Materials ). 1982-1999 he was the Director of The Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids. In 1968/69 he was a Guggenheim Fellow Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva. In 1988 he was Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Utah.

In 1990, he founded the UNIAX Corporation.

In 1983 he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize of the American Physical Society. Since 2001 he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.