Scientific Advisory Board

Appointed by the Chairman of the Governing Board, the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) reviews research programmes and projects of the Institute of Functional Intelligent Materials and provide counsel and recommendations to the Board and the Director of I-FIM.

Allan MacDonald

Prof. Allan Hugh Macdonald
Chair, I-FIM Scientific Advisory Board

Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Physics

Professor, Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin

Allan H. MacDonald is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair Professor of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, and attended local schools completing a B.S. at St. Francis Xavier University in 1973. He completed his Ph.D.in physics at The University of Toronto in 1978, working with S.H. Vosko on relativistic generalizations of density functional theory, and on the application of density functional theory to magnetism in metals.

Prior to joining the University of Texas, he worked at the Ottawa laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada (1978-1987) and at Indiana University (1987-2000). He has held visiting positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the Max Plank Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.

MacDonald's research has focused on new or unexplained phenomena related to the quantum physics of interacting electrons in materials. He has contributed to theories of the integer and fractional Quantum Hall effects, spintronics in metals and semiconductors, topological Bloch bands and momentum-space Berry curvature phenomena, correlated electron-hole fluids and exciton and polariton condensates, and two-dimensional materials.

In 2011 MacDonald and Rafi Bistritzer, a former postdoctoral researcher in MacDonald's lab, predicted that it would be possible to realize strong correlation physics in graphene bilayers twisted to a magic relative orientation angle, foreshadowing the field of twistronics. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, an experimentalist at MIT, found that the magic angle resulted in the unusual electrical properties the UT Austin scientists had predicted. At 1.1 degrees rotation at sufficiently low temperatures, electrons move from one layer to the other, creating a lattice and the phenomenon of superconductivity. The magic angle allows electrical current to pass unimpeded, apparently without energy loss. This could lead to more efficient electrical power transmission or new materials for quantum applications.

His recent work is focused on anticipating new physics in moire superlattices, and on achieving a full understanding of magic-angle bilayer graphene and transition-metal dichalcogenide moire superlattice systems.

MacDonald received the Canadian Association of Physicists's Herzberg Medal in 1987, the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 2007, the Ernst Mach Honorary Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 2012, and the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2020.  He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and the National Academy of the Sciences in 2012.

Mikhail Katsnelson

Prof. Mikhail Katsnelson
Member, I-FIM Scientific Advisory Board

Professor of Theoretical Physics, Radboud University Nijmegen

Mikhail Iosifovich Katsnelson is a Dutch professor of theoretical physics of Russian descent. He works at Radboud University Nijmegen where he specializes in theoretical solid-state physics and many-body quantum physics.

From 1972 to 1977 he attended and then graduated from the Ural State University in Sverdlovsk. In 1980 he obtained his Ph.D. from Institute of Metal Physics in the same place where his advisor was Serghey V. Vonsovsky. In 1985 he defended his thesis for his Doctor of Science degree called Strong electron correlations in transition metals, their alloys and compounds and from 1990 to 1998 became Max-Planck-Institute visiting professor.

From 2004 to 2007 Katsnelson worked with many Russian and Dutch physicists on the nitrogen dioxide and discovered that its closed shell dimer N2O4 creates only weak doping which is also known as density of states in a graphene. He also discovered that density of states is ideal for chemical sensing and explained its single molecule detection. On 23 September 2007 he along with Annalisa Fasolino have proven that chemical bonding in carbon is caused by setting ripples' thermal fluctuations to 80 angstrom. In 2010 Katsnelson worked with physicists from India such as Rashid Jalil, Rahul R. Nair, and nanotechnologist Fredrik Schedin of University of Manchester and have discovered that fluorine atoms are attached to the carbon of the graphene therefore creating a new version called fluorographene that can be stable in the air with a temperature of 400 °C (752 °F). In 2012 he and his colleagues have used prototype device which contained graphene heterojunctions which was combined with either thin boron nitride or molybdenum disulfide which was used as a vertical transport barrier. During the experiment, the room temperature was set from ≈50 and ≈10,000 and they prove that using such prototypes is beneficial for high-frequency operations and large-scale integrations.

Since 2014 Katsnelson is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Vladimir Falko
Mark Smith

Professor Vladimir Falko
Member, I-FIM Scientific Advisory Board

Professor of Theoretical Physics
Head of Theory Division in the School of Physics & Astronomy, The University of Manchester
Director, National Graphene Institute, The University of Manchester

Professor Falko is one of the UK's leading condensed matter theorists. He has made substantial contributions towards the understanding of the electronic and optical properties of graphene, including the discovery of bilayer graphene.

He has played a pivotal role in shaping the European graphene and other two-dimensional material research community, establishing the 'Graphene Week' conference series and leading the European Graphene Flagship work package: 'Fundamental Science of Graphene and 2D Materials Beyond Graphene'. He is also Co-Director of the Graphene NOWNANO Centre for Doctoral Training programme, based at The University of Manchester.

Professor Falko’s research interests include:

  • graphene and related two-dimensional atomic crystals: electronic transport and optical properties;
  • heterostructures of two-dimensional atomic materials (graphene-hBN, etc.);
  • strongly correlated states of electrons in two-dimensional materials, Quantum Hall effect;
  • fundamentals of nanoelectronics, spintronics, and nano-electro-mechanical systems;
  • quantum optics and optical properties of semiconductor quantum dots.