Rodney Ruoff

Rodney S. Ruoff earned his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981 with high honors and his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988. Early in his career, he held postdoctoral fellowships as a Fulbright Fellow at the Max Planck Institute für Strömungsforschung (1989-1990) and at IBM Watson Research Laboratory (1990-1991), followed by a role as Research Staff Scientist at SRI International's Molecular Physics Laboratory (1991-1996). He advanced to Associate Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis (1997-2000), then to Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University (2000-2007), where he also served as John Evans Professor of Nanoengineering (2003-2007).

From September 2007 to December 2013, Ruoff held the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin. His research at UT Austin and throughout his career centers on the synthesis, properties, and applications of novel carbon materials, including graphene, carbon nanotubes, sp³-sp² hybrid carbons, and nanocomposites. Key achievements include pioneering chemical vapor deposition growth of graphene on copper substrates and production of large single-crystal graphene sheets, as reported in publications such as 'The Role of Surface Oxygen in the Growth of Large Single-Crystal Graphene on Copper' (Science, 2013), 'Graphene Synthesis via Magnetic Inductive Heating of Copper Substrates' (ACS Nano, 2013), and 'Strength and Breaking Mechanism of Multiwalled Carbon Nanotubes Under Tensile Load' (Science, 2000). Ruoff has garnered over 289,000 citations and received prestigious honors including Fellowships from the Materials Research Society (2013), American Physical Society (2011), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), the Lee Hsun Lecture Award (2009), and the James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials (2018). He currently serves as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UNIST and Director of the IBS Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials.