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Robert Haddon
grew up in Longford, Tasmania. He obtained the B.Sc.(Hon) degree at Melbourne
University in 1966, and shortly thereafter accompanied L.M. Jackman to
the Pennsylvania State University where he was awarded an organic
chemistry Ph.D. degree in 1971. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow with M.J.S.
Dewar at the University of Texas during the period 1972-3, after which
he took up a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship at the Australian National
University. In 1976 he joined the group of F.Wudl at Bell Telephone
Laboratories.
During the
period 1978 to 1990 he was a member of the Chemical Physics Research
Department, before assuming a position in the Materials Chemistry
Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories as Distinguished Member of
Technical Staff. In 1997 he was appointed Professor
of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Kentucky, and in 1998 he
became Director of the Advanced Carbon Materials Center (NSF Materials
Research Science and Engineering Center).
In 1998 he
co-founded CarboLex, Inc, a company that produces and sells
single-walled carbon nanotubes. In 1999, he founded Carbon Solutions,
Inc, a company that is focused on the processing and dissolution of
carbon materials for advanced applications.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
His research interests have been directed
toward the electronic structure and properties of molecules and
materials, with particular emphasis on transport, magnetism,
superconductivity, device fabrication and miniaturization, and the
discovery of new classes of electronic materials. He has developed a
number of theoretical models of the electronic structure of p-electron
systems, and over the past ten years he has turned his attention to the
understanding of nonplanar conjugated organic molecules with particular
reference to the fullerenes. In collaboration with colleagues at AT&T
Bell Laboratories, he discovered the alkali metal fullerides and their
conductivity properties and the occurrence of superconductivity in the A3C60
compounds (A=K,Rb). He was named 1991 Person of the Year by
Superconductor Week, and a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society“For work on
organic electronic materials, including the prediction and discovery of
superconductivity in alkali-metal-doped carbon-60.”
His research group has now turned their attention to the
study of radical conductors and carbon nanotubes. In
1998 they have recently prepared the first soluble single-walled carbon
nanotubes (SWNTs), allowing the study of naked carbon metals and
semiconductors in solution. Both ionic and covalent
solution phase chemistry were demonstrated, with concomitant modulation
of the electronic band structure. In 1999 they synthesized and
characterized the first phenalenyl-based neutral radical molecular
conductors. |
