Moungi Bawendi, PhD’88, pioneered the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductor crystals now used in electronic displays, LED lighting, solar cells, and biomedical imaging. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he studied with Karl Freed, the Henry G. Gale Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, and Takeshi Oka, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Chemistry.
At Oka’s encouragement, Bawendi spent a summer at Bell Laboratories, where chemist Louis E. Brus introduced him to one of nanotechnology’s central challenges: producing quantum dots that were both stable and uniform. There, Bawendi worked alongside future University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos, AB’81, another leader in nanotechnology.
After joining the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, Bawendi, with his graduate students David J. Norris and Christopher B. Murray, developed a reproducible method for synthesizing high-quality, uniform quantum dots. Their breakthrough gave researchers precise control over the material’s properties and made large-scale applications possible, paving the way for advances in LED displays, lasers, solar cells, biomedical imaging, and biosensors. For his contributions to quantum dot research, Bawendi shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Louis E. Brus and physicist Alexei I. Ekimov.