IOP Groups
Alan MacDiarmid
born April 14, 1927 in New Zealand died February 7, 2007
Obituaries published in: The Times February 9, 2007
He was a chemistry graduate who received a PhD in inorganic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1953. He won a New Zealand Shell Scholarship to study silicon hydrides at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where we has awarded a Ph.D in 1955. After a spell at St. Andrews he joined the chemistry department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained for 45 years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 jointly with Alan Heeger and Hidecki Shirikawa with whom he had developed plastics that conduct electricity. They diffused bromine into polyacetylene film and found it then conducted electricity millions of time more efficiently. These conductive polymers have important practical applications as displays in mobile phones, in solar cells and in 'smart' windows which can exclude sunlight.
^ To the top ^