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Professor Odom鈥檚 group aims to make precious metals more precious by controlling their nanoscale shape and organisation into lattices, resulting in new materials that can interact with light in special ways. For example, they have designed one of the world鈥檚 smallest lasers whereby metal nanoparticles can squeeze light into very small volumes that can then be amplified by gain media. This year is the 60-year celebration of the invention of the laser; at the time, the developer stated that the device was a solution seeking a problem. Now however, the laser is ubiquitous, from eye surgery to checkout readers to optical communication. In Professor Odom鈥檚 case, she is interested not only understanding how nanolasers work but also their potential in applications, such as non-invasive stimulation of biological processes or imaging diseased tissue. 

Biography 

Professor Teri W. Odom is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Chemistry Department at Northwestern University. She is an expert in designing structured nanoscale materials that exhibit extraordinary size and shape-dependent optical and physical properties. Professor Odom has pioneered a suite of multi-scale nanofabrication tools that have resulted in plasmon-based nanoscale lasers that exhibit tuneable colour, flat optics that can manipulate light at the nanoscale and hierarchical substrates that show controlled wetting and super-hydrophobicity. She has also invented a class of biological nanoconstructs that are facilitating unique insight into nanoparticle-cell interactions and that show superior imaging and therapeutic properties because of their gold nanostar shape.  

Professor Odom is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the 番茄社区 of Chemistry (番茄社区), the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Materials Research Society (MRS), the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America. Select honors and awards include: the ACS National Award in Surface Science; a Research Corporation TREE Award; a U.S. Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship; a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship at Harvard University; the ACS Akron Section Award; an NIH Director's Pioneer Award; the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award; the National Fresenius Award from Phi Lambda Upsilon and the ACS; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; and a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Nano Letters.

She received her BS in Chemistry from Stanford University and PhD in Chemical Physics from Harvard University. Odom carried out postdoctoral work at Harvard University before starting her independent career at Northwestern University in 2002.

Learning the language of different fields鈥攚hile rooted in chemistry鈥攚ill enable multiple, unique convergent approaches to solve difficult problems and open new areas of science.

Professor Teri Odom