Vincent H. Crespi named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Vincent H. Crespi, distinguished professor of physics, materials science and engineering, and chemistry at Penn State, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of ten Eberly College of Science faculty members to receive the honor this year. Election as a 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. Crespi was selected for “distinguished contributions to the theoretical understanding of nanoscale materials, including carbon nanotubes and artificial spin ice.”

Crespi's research aims to develop a broad framework of knowledge in the condensed-matter physics of materials and novel thread-like polymers. A critical aspect of his research strategy is close collaboration with experimentalists. Among the applications he is interested in are nanomaterials and nanochemistry based on one-dimensional carbon nanothreads and two-dimensional atomically thin sheets of atoms, both semiconducting and metallic. He is studying their synthesis, chemical and physical properties, and electronic structures.

Crespi is the director of the Center for Nanoscale Science, a National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Penn State. He is also theory lead of the Two-Dimensional Crystal Consortium (2DCC), a National Science Foundation Materials Innovation Platform and director of the nascent Center for Nanothread Chemistry (CNC), a phase I National Science Foundation Center for Chemical Innovation. His previous awards and honors include being elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007 and receiving a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Physical Science in 2000. He received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) in 1999 and a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 1998.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1997, Crespi was a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory from 1995 to 1997 and a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in graduate-level condensed-matter physics at the University of California at Berkeley from 1994 to 1995. Crespi earned a bachelor's degree in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 and a doctoral degree in physics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994.