Background
Heeger was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to a Jewish family. He grew up in Akron, Iowa, where his father owned a general store. At age nine, following his father"s death, the family moved to Sioux City.
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Alan Jay Heeger
Edit Profilechemist engineer physicist professor
Education
University of Nebraska–Lincoln. University of California, Berkeley.
Career
Heeger earned a Bachelor of Surgery in physics and mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1957, and a Doctor of Philosophy in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. From 1962 to 1982 he was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1982 he commenced his present appointment as a professor in the Physics Department and the Materials Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
His research has led to the formation of numerous start-up companies including Uniax, Konarka, and Sirigen, founded in 2003 by Guillermo C. Bazan, Patrick J. Dietzen, Brent South. Gaylord.
In October 2010, Heeger participated in the United States of America Science and Engineering Festival"s Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist over a brown-bag lunch. Heeger has been a judge of the STAGE International Script Competition three times (2006, 2007, 2010).
"Perhaps the greatest pleasure of being a scientist is to have an abstract idea, then to do an experiment (more often a series of experiments is required) that demonstrates the idea was correct. That is, Nature actually behaves as conceived in the mind of the scientist
This process is the essence of creativity in science.
I have been fortunate to have experienced this intense pleasure many times in my life." Alan J Heeger, Never Lose Your Nerve!
Heeger, Alan J (2015). Never Lose Your Nerve!., World Scientific Publishing.
Achievements
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Alan Heeger was a founder of Uniax, which was acquired by DuPont. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa "for their discovery and development of conductive polymers;" They published their results on polyacetylene a conductive polymer in 1977 He had won the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 1983 and, in 1995, the Balzan Prize for Science of Non-Biological Materials.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences. Chinese Academy of Sciences]
Heeger is also a member of the United States of America Science and Engineering Festival"s Advisory Board.
Connections
Awards
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Guggenheim Fellowship; Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Balzan Prize Balzan Prize; Buckley Prize
The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the brotherhood of man.The International Balzan Prize Foundation awards four annual monetary prizes to people or organizations who have made outstanding achievements in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, culture, as well as for endeavours for peace and the brotherhood of man.