Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)

Palo Alto, CA January 23, 2014 Foresight is pleased to announce the winners of the 2013 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes for Nanotechnology Theory and Experiment.

The winner of the 2013 Feynman Prize for Experiment is Alexander K. Zettl, Professor, Condensed Matter Physics And Materials Science, U.C. Berkeley, and Senior Scientist, Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The award recognizes Prof. Zettl's exceptional work in the fabrication of nanoscale electromechanical systems (NEMS), spanning multiple decades and including carbon nanotube-based bearings, actuators, and sensors brought to fruition with cutting-edge nanoscale engineering. Making remarkable strides towards nanoscale integrated systems, Prof Zettl produced a reversible mass transport memory device which integrated a nanoparticle and a nanotube into a more complex functional device with external controllability, and most recently a loudspeaker incorporating a graphene diaphragm, demonstrating that high-performance, nanoscale materials can be engineered into usable products even before those materials are fully characterized. Additional accomplishments of his solid state physics research group include chracterizing electronic, magnetic and mechanical properties of diverse nanoscale materials.

The winner of the 2013 Feynman Prize for Theory is David N. Beratan, R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Physics, Duke University. The award recognizes Prof. Beratan's development of theoretical approaches to understand the function of complex molecular and macromolecular assemblies and machines. The accomplishments of his research group range from formulating the first molecular-level descriptions of how charge flows through proteins and nucleic acids to designing molecular-scale memory devices. His research group established the electron tunneling pathway model for biological electron transfer to understand the molecular machines of bioenergetics, the "inverse design" approach to discover molecular structures with optimal properties, and the first simulations of how chiral information is transferred at the nanoscale through electronic and conformational imprinting..

The awards will be presented at the 2014 Foresight Technical Conference: Integration, to be held February 7-9, 2014 at the Crowne Plaza Cabana Hotel, Palo Alto, CA USA, where the winners will give lectures on their groundbreaking work to leading scientists in the field of nanotechnology.

In awarding the prizes, Ralph C. Merkle, Chairman of the Prize Committee, noted that "The work of these Feynman Prize winners has brought us one step closer to answering Feynman's 1959 question, 'What would happen if we could arrange atoms one by one the way we want them?' The ability to simulate and manipulate atoms advanced by the work of these Prize winners will enable us to design and build engineered molecular machinery with atomic precision. It will take us another step on the way to the development of revolutionary nanotechnologies that will transform our lives for the better."

The annual Feynman Prizes recognize significant advancements on the road to the award of the $250,000 Feynman Grand Prize, an incentive prize that will be awarded to the first researchers to make a nanometer-scale robotic arm and a nanometer-scale computing device, two critical components of an atomic scalemolecular manufacturing system.

The Foresight Feynman Prizes were established by the Foresight Institute in 1993 and named in honor of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman whose influential essay, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" inspired the first work on nanoscale science. The Institute awards Feynman prizes each year to recognize researchersone for theoretical work and one for empirical researchwhose recent work has most advanced the field toward the achievement of Feynman's vision for nanotechnology: molecular manufacturing, the construction of atomically-precise products through the use of molecular machine systems.

For more information about the Foresight Feynman Prizes, past winners and the Feynman Grand Prize please see the information on the Foresight website at http://www.foresight.org. For more information about prizes and prize nominations please contact foresight@foresight.org.

This year's Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology were made possible, in part, by donations from Colleagues and Friends of Foresight, including:

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Zettl awarded Foresight Feynman Prize in experimental nanoscience