Prof. John D. Joannopoulos

John D. Joannopoulos is the Director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, a position he has held since 2006. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and served as its Chair of Applied Physical Sciences. He has been on the Faculty of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor of Physics (1974), Associate Professor of Physics (1978), Professor of Physics (1983) and was awarded the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics Chair in 1996. He was appointed as the Director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies in 2006. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1968 and 1974, respectively. 

The research of Prof. Joannopoulos spans two major directions. The first is devoted to creating a realistic and microscopic theoretical description of the properties of material systems. His approach is fundamental to predicting geometric, electronic and dynamical structure, ab-initio — that is, given only the atomic numbers of the constituent atoms as experimental input. Ab-initio investigations are invaluable because they can stand on their own, complement experimental observations, and probe into regimes inaccessible to experiment. The second major direction involves the development of a new class of materials called photonic crystals, which are designed to affect the properties of photons in much the same way that semiconductors affect the properties of electrons. These materials provide a new dimension in the ability to control and mold the flow of light. 

Prof. Joannopoulos is the author or co-author of over 670 refereed journal articles, 4 textbooks (3 on Photonic Crystals, 1 on Quantum Theory of Materials), and 126 issued U.S. Patents. He is also co-founder of 6 startup companies: OmniGuide Inc., Luminus Devices, Inc., WiTricity Corporation, Typhoon HIL, Inc., Lux Labs, Inc., and Lightelligence. 

He is an elected Member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, and World Technology Network. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1976-1980), a John S. Guggenheim Fellow (1981-1982), and has been on the Thompson Reuters Web of Science Most Highly Cited Researchers List, with current Web of Science citations over 78,000 and a 123 h-index. He is the recipient of the MIT School of Science Graduate Teaching Award (1991), the William Buechner Teaching Prize of the Department of Physics (1996), the David Adler Award of the American Physical Society (1997), the Aneesur Rahman Prize of the American Physical Society (2015), and the Max Born Medal Award of the Optical Society of America (2015). He served as Divisional Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters and a member of the Editorial Board of Reviews of Modern Physics, and