Dr. Paul Alivisatos is a distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). He also directs the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute (ENSI), and holds professorships in UC Berkeley’s departments of materials science and chemistry. In addition, he is a founder of two prominent nanotechnology companies, Nanosys and Quantum Dot Corp, now a part of Life Tech. He was nominated for the Chemistry Nobel Prize in 2013.

He was born in Chicago in 1959. At the age of 10, Paul lost his mother and moved to Greece to live with his uncle’s family. He remained there through high school and soon after he relocated to the United States, where he got his Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1981 and his doctorate in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986.

For his excellent progress in his academic work, Alivisatos has been ranked 5^th in the list of the 100 top chemists of the past decade, released by Thomson Reuters, a Canadian media and financial-data firm.

Professor Alivisatos is a pioneer in nanocrystal technology. A nanocrystal is a crystalline particle of any material, with at least one dimension measuring less than 1000 nanometers, where 1 nanometer is defined as 1 thousand-millionth of a meter. Nanocrystals have a wide variety of potential applications and are most commonly used in the industrial construction of low-cost photovoltaic elements and artificial photosynthesis devices.

In 2014 he was awarded with the Commander of the Order of Honor by the Hellenic Republic for his contribution to Science. In the ceremony at the Embassy of Greece in Washington, the Ambassador of Greece to the United States, Mr. Christos Panagopoulos praised the work and achievements of the Greek-American professor, once hailed as “one of the fathers of nanoscience”.

“I really am deeply honored to receive this award from my homeland of Greece. I was educated in Greece, and the years that I spent there changed my life forever” said prof. Alivisatos.