Alan Heeger · Science & Medicine
Chemist known for conductive polymers; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000
1936, Sioux City, Iowa, United States
United States (Berkeley · University of Pennsylvania · UC Santa Barbara)
Alan Heeger is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Chemist known for conductive polymers; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000
Origins and early life
Alan Jay Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on 22 January 1936 into a Jewish family. He grew up in Akron, Iowa, where his father kept a general store; the father died when Alan was nine and the family moved back to Sioux City. He took a degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Nebraska in 1957 and a doctorate in physics at Berkeley in 1961, taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1962 to 1982, and then moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has held chairs in both physics and materials.
Work and career
Plastics were understood to be insulators — that is what makes them useful as the sheath around a wire — and the assumption ran deep enough that nobody looked hard for exceptions. In 1977 Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa reported that polyacetylene, doped with iodine, conducts electricity like a metal, its conductivity rising by many orders of magnitude. The finding opened the field of conducting polymers and with it light-emitting displays, printable solar cells, plastic transistors and flexible sensors, and it fed back into pure physics through the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model of one-dimensional chains.
Recognition
The three shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Heeger has also founded companies to carry the materials out of the laboratory, among them Uniax and Konarka, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Chemistry
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Chemist known for conductive polymers; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Chemistry
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