Prof. Nathan S. Lewis
Dr. Nathan Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, has been on the faculty at California Institute of Technology since 1988 and has served as Professor since 1991. He has also served as Principal Investigator of the Beckman Institute Molecular Materials Resource Center at Caltech since 1992. He was on the faculty at Stanford, as Assistant Professor from 1981 to 1985, and as tenured Associate Professor from 1986 to 1988. Dr. Lewis received his Ph. D. in Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Lewis has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and a Presidential Young Investigator. He received the Fresenius Award in 1990, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry in 1991, the Orton Memorial Lecture award in 2003, the Princeton Environmental Award in 2003, the Michael Faraday Medal of the Royal Society of Electrochemistry in 2008, and was elected to the National Academy of Inventors’ 2017 class of fellows. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Energy & Environmental Science. He has published over 500 papers and has supervised approximately 100 graduate students and postdoctoral associates.
His research interests include artificial photosynthesis and electronic noses. Lewis has been active in the solar fuels, solar chemical field, for over 40 years. Details of these research topics focus on light-induced electron transfer reactions, both at surfaces and in transition metal complexes, surface chemistry and photochemistry of semiconductor/liquid interfaces, novel uses of conducting organic polymers and polymer/conductor composites, and development of sensor arrays that use pattern recognition algorithms to identify odorants, mimicking the mammalian olfaction process.