Mauricio Terrones Named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Mauricio Terrones, a professor of physics and a professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State University, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed by peers upon members of the AAAS, the world's largest general scientific society and the publisher of the journal Science.

Mauricio Terrones is a materials physicist who has made many important experimental and theoretical contributions to the field of nanoscience -- the chemical and biological manipulation of structures with dimensions of 1 to 100 nanometers. In his research, he produces novel carbon-based nanomaterials, whose potential applications are industrial, biomedical, and electronic. To analyze the properties of these materials, Terrones uses electron microscopy and other sophisticated techniques. He also has co-developed new and low-cost methods for the production of carbon nanomaterials. Other research groups now use his innovative techniques to produce carbon nanomaterials.

Before joining the Eberly College of Science at Penn State, Terrones was a professor at the Institute of Physics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and at the Instituto Potosino de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (IPICYT) in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. At IPICYT, Terrones established a new laboratory called the Laboratory for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Research -- LINAN. Devoted to the synthesis and characterization of nanostructured materials, LINAN includes instruments such as electron microscopes, characterization equipment, and synthesis reactors.

In 2011, Terrones was a visiting scholar at Trinity College at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Among Terrones's many other awards and honors a 2010 Chair of Excellence at the Department of Materials Science at the Universidad Carlos III in Spain, a 2009 Somiya award for international collaborations, a 2008 Japan Carbon Award for Innovative Research, a 2007 Fernando Alba Medal for his contributions to experimental physics, and the 2006 TWAS prize in Engineering given by the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World in Mexico for his work on doped carbon nanotubes. In 1999, Terrones received an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, with which he carried out research for 14 months at the Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung in Germany. In that same year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization awarded Terrones the Javed Husain Prize for his contributions to the field of carbon nanotechnology. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sussex from 1997 to 1999.

Terrones has authored over 290 papers in refereed journals including Nature, Science, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Materials, Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Applied Physics Letters. His research articles have been cited more than 12,000 times worldwide. Terrones is a fellow of Mexico's Academy of Sciences for the Developing World and the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He is also a principal editor of the Journal of Materials Research, an associate editor of Materials Express, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the journals Nano Today, Carbon, and New Carbon Materials and Carbon Technologies. He is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society, and a founding member of both the Mexican Society for Crystallography and the Mexican Society of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.

In 1997, Terrones obtained a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Physics at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Harold W. Kroto.