People

Faculty Profiles Administrative Personnel Distinguished Visitors Students, Staff & Faculty

These distinguished visitors spend approximately one month with us each year:

Prof. Sir Harold Kroto (Sussex)
Prof. C.N.R. Rao (Bangalore)
Prof. Manfred Rühle (Stuttgart)
Prof. E.W. (Bert) Meijer (Eindhoven)
Prof. Michele Parrinello (ETH Zurich)

Sir Harold Kroto is internationally recognized as a leading expert in the area of fullerene science. In 1996 Harry was jointly awarded, with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University, Texas, the Nobel Laureate for Chemistry for the discovery, in 1985, of the molecule C60, now known as Buckminster Fullerene or colloquially Buckyball. In the same year Harry Kroto became Sir Harry when he was knighted for his lifetime record of contributions to chemistry. Prior to receipt of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Professor Kroto had already received a number of international awards in materials and chemistry, including the prestigious International Prize for New Materials from the American Physical Society and the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize. He had also been appointed to a Royal Society Research Professorship, an unusual position granted to the most innovative scientists in Great Britain, which frees them from teaching and administrative responsibilities. He is Chairman of the board of the Vega Science Trust, which is produces science programs for network television. 35 have been made and so far 20 have been broadcast on the BBC Learning Zone.

Professor C.N.R. Rao is a world reknowned authority in the field of Chemistry. He is the Linus Pauling Research Professor and Honorary President of the Jawarharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, as well as the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the Indian National Science Academy. He is a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences and a Founding Fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences. Professor C.N.R. Rao's contributions to the field of solid state chemistry and materials science are remarkable for their enormous diversity, their originality, and their extraordinary prolificity. He has published over 1000 research papers and edited or written 35 books in a career spanning over 40 years.

	Professor Manfred Rühle is one of the world's leading specialists in the study of advanced materials by high-resolution electron microscopy. His most notable achievement was the elucidation of the structure of interfaces between metals and ceramics. He has pioneered the development of quantitative microscopy, directly comparing image simulations with experimental observations so as to refine the detailed atomic structure and bonding of interfaces. He is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and the Director of the Max Planck Institute fur Metallforschung, Stuttgart.
	Professor E.W. (Bert) Meijer's main research interests are the design, synthesis, characterization, and possible applications of supramolecular architectures, with special emphasis on chirality, dendrimers, and hydrogen bonding architectures, and their use in functional materials and biomedical applications. From 2004, he is University Professor of Molecular Sciences at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Bert Meijer is member of many editorial advisory boards, including Chemical Communications and Angewandte Chemie. Since 2005 he is Editor of Journal of Polymer Science Part A: Polymer Chemistry. The recipient of the 2006 ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry is Prof. Dr. E.W. (Bert) Meijer of the Eindhoven University of Technology.
	Professor Michele Parrinello has studied a large number of different systems, but there is one to which his name is especially linked: water. The pioneering Ab initio liquid water simulation[16] was published by Parrinello and co-workers and that landmark study was the beginning of a new era for the research on water, solvation, liquid state chemistry, and hydrogen-bonded systems in general in which computer simulations are taking a leading role not only for the deepening of the microscopic understanding but also in the prediction of unforeseen properties and phenomena. His outstanding achievements in the physical sciences were honored when he was elected member/fellow of the American Physical Society (1991), the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences (1995), the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (2000), the Royal Society (2004), the European Academy of Sciences (2004), and the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (2005) among others. He is a current professor for Computational Science at the ETH Zurich.