Norris, David J., Prof. Dr.

Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory (Institute of Process Engineering)

Areas of Interest:

• Energy, Flows and Processes

Biography
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David J. Norris was elected Professor of Materials Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in March, 2010. He is currently the Director of the Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering.

Born in 1968, Prof. Norris received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1990. He then pursued a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at MIT, graduating in 1995. After a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, he joined the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, where he started a research effort on optical materials in 1997. In 2001, he moved to the University of Minnesota as an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. He was promoted to Professor in 2006 and served as the Director of Graduate Studies in Chemical Engineering from 2004 to 2010.

In his laboratory, Prof. Norris investigates how materials can be engineered to create new and useful optical properties. In particular, by understanding fundamental behavior at the nanoscale, he hopes to obtain semiconductor and metallic structures that are useful for solar energy devices. Currently, this includes the study of semiconductor nanocrystals and plasmonic films.

Prof. Norris is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served as editor for Photonics and Nanostructures and as a member of the editorial board for Chemistry of Materials and Advanced Functional Materials. In 2006-2007, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Technical University of Munich. He was a member of the Advisory Board for the Petroleum Research Foundation in Washington, D.C. In addition to numerous scientific review panels in the US and Europe, Prof. Norris has been a consultant for several international corporations on the topic of optical nanomaterials.