The first person of Tunisian ancestry to win the Chemistry Nobel Prize is scientist Moungi Bawendi, a Tunisian-American.
Together with Louis Brus and Aleksey Ekimov, Bawendi received the prestigious award for their work on quantum dots, which are tiny atomic clusters that are used to produce colours in flat-screen televisions, light-emitting diode (LED) lamps, and tools that allow surgeons to view blood arteries in tumours.
When exposed to light, the extremely small semiconducting nanoparticles known as quantum dots emit a blue, red, or green glow.
The three US-based scientists’ work on quantum dots has been cited by the Royal Academy of Sciences as having the potential to lead to “flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells, and encrypted quantum communication” in the future.
This indicates that there will be a wide range of industrial and academic applications as a result of Bawendi and his colleagues’ work on specially produced quantum dots.
Bawendi stated that receiving the honour left him feeling “very surprised, sleepy, shocked, unexpected and very honoured.”
Co-winner Brus stated that the news was so surprising that he didn’t answer the first six calls he got from different persons trying to tell him the good news.
The identities of the Nobel chemistry award recipients, Bawendi, Brus, and Ekimov, were accidentally made public in an email sent by the academy on Wednesday.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made a mistake, according to Johan Aqvist, leader of the academy’s chemistry Nobel committee, who had previously told Reuters at the time. No decision has been reached as of yet; our meeting begins at 9:30 CET (7:30 GMT). The winners are still to be chosen.
Peter Medawar (Medicine Nobel Prize, 1960)
The son of mathematician Mohamed Salah Bounty and Hélène Poupart, Bawendi is an American chemist with Tunisian ancestry. He was born in Paris in 1961.
After spending his formative years in France and Tunisia, Bawendi’s father moved to America, where he earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago and a master’s in chemistry from Harvard University.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Bawendi has been co-teaching thermodynamics and kinetics with Professor Keith Nelson since 2008.
One of the chemists with the most citations over the last ten years is Bawendi, a pioneer in the field of colloidal quantum dot research.
