President of the University of Chicago and John D. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry Paul Alivisatos has been awarded for the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
President Alivisatos is one of three nanoscientists who have been awarded this year’s prize. MIT’s Robert S. Langer and Northwestern’s Chad A. Mirkin were also selected by the committee to share the prize.
“Langer, Alivisatos and Mirkin are science pioneers. Building from fundamental research and scientific curiosity they have become inventors and major founders of the nanomedicine field”, says Bodil Holst, Chair of the Nanoscience Committee.
The $1 million Kavli Prize recognizes scientists for significant contributions and breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience once every two years. Of the 65 laureates awarded the prize since 2008, 10 have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.
Addressing the selection of Alivisatos, the committee wrote:
“Armand Paul Alivisatos pioneered the use of semiconductor nanocrystals for biological imaging by tailoring them through surface functionalization. Semiconductor nanocrystals, or “quantum dots”, are nanoparticles that possess bright, size-dependent light-emitting properties. Alivisatos showed that these nanoscale “beacons” can be used as multicolor fluorescent probes in biological imaging. Semiconductor nanocrystals are widely used today in applications such as live cell tracking, labeling and in vivo imaging.”
Additionally, the committee provided context for how Alivisatos achievements fit into the larger narrative of scientific development:
“Armand Paul Alivisatos approached biomedical research by focusing on imaging. His appointment as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 came only a few years after Luis Brus’s pioneering work on the colloidal synthesis of semiconductor nanocrystals, also known as quantum dots, which earned him both the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2008 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023. The appeal of quantum dots was extraordinary. Once illuminated by a laser beam, they emit light at wavelengths determined quite precisely from their size in the nanometer range. They could potentially be used in optoelectronics devices like LEDs, solar cells or TV displays, as well as fluorophores in biomedical imaging. Because the light emission of quantum dots of different sizes can be triggered by the same laser, one could design imaging with different colors. This had so far not been possible with organic dye molecules used in bioimaging. The difficulty, however, was to produce large amounts of quantum dots with a specific size in reliable way. Using his skills in chemical synthesis, Alivisatos demonstrated how the various processes of the synthesis of quantum dots have an impact on the size and hence on the optical emission, publishing the results in a milestone paper in 1998. In the same year, Alivisatos and his team demonstrated the use of semiconductor nanocrystals as fluorescence labels in mouse 3T3 fibroblasts. An essential step in achieving imaging in tissue was to add a silica layer to the quantum dot so that the nanoparticles would be biocompatible and stable in an aqueous solution. Following this route, the team produced a two-color image with a single illumination source. Since 1998 Alivisatos’s work has led to the synthesis of quantum dots with a variety of shapes and sizes, and his results have been brought to the market via several startups, including the Quantum Dot Corporation, which produces quantum dots for imaging.”
In a letter of congratulations addressed to the department, University of Chicago Department of Chemistry Chair Professor Jiwoong Park wrote:
“Prof. Alivisatos is a world-renowned expert in the science and application of nanocrystal quantum dots (QDs), a research topic he has worked on for over 30 years. His impact to this research field is simply remarkable: he published over 400 papers, which garnered over 150,000 citations. And his body of work demonstrated the highest level of creativity, innovative thinking, and vision for the future. His papers reported QDs as photo-stable fluorescent markers for biological imaging (Science 1998), QD-based photovoltaic cells (Science 2002; Science 2005), QD-polymer hybrid light emitting diodes (Nature 1994), bio-nano architecture using DNA-QD assembly (Nature 1996), and molecule-QD electronic device (Nature 1997). These works opened exciting research directions based on nanomaterials, and he inspired researchers to develop novel structures aided by atomic and nanoscale chemical design and characterizations. (e.g., anisotropic QDs (Nature 2000, Science 2001), nanorods and multi-branch (JACS 2000), in-situ TEM imaging of QD growth (Science 2012)).
Through these Prof. Alivisatos has shown how one can pursue fundamental science with depth with an ambitious vision and practical impact.”