Prof. Prof. Tai-Chang Chiang (UIUC) is the recipient for the 2015 Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics
TAI-CHANG CHIANG
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Citation:
"For his elegant demonstration of multiple quantum well resonances in metallic thin films achieved by growing films of unprecedented uniformity, and his demonstration and use of quantum effects to understand and control the stability of thin films."
Background:
Prof. Tai-Chang Chiang received a B.S. in physics from the National Taiwan University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California-Berkeley in 1978. He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1980 after working for two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. He held a guest appointment as Scientific Director of the Synchrotron Radiation Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2010 to 2014. Prior to that, he served as Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory's Associate Director from 1999 to 2006. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (since 1986), an outstanding referee for the American Physical Society journals (2008, inaugural group), and a recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984). His research in recent years has been focused on the electronic, spin,
lattice, and phonon structures of solids, surfaces, and thin film systems. Much of his experimental work has been performed using synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Synchrotron Radiation Center.