Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University, has been named to receive the 2014 Materials Research Society (MRS) Medal. He was cited for “the discovery and development of nanostructured thermoelectric materials.” Kanatzidis will be recognized at the 2014 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston.

In permanently changing the field of thermoelectric materials research by shifting the paradigm from a bulk homogeneous materials problem to a nanoscience problem that requires nanoscale engineering, Kanatzidis opened paths for future advances that led to performance breakthroughs. By doubling the figure of merit (ZT), Kanatzidis’s thermoelectric materials enable devices to operate at 14% efficiency, up from 7% before these breakthroughs. Industrial development of these materials is now under way. These nanostructuring phenomena , as demonstrated by Kanatzidis and his group, have been validated by theoretical studies and have led to a new paradigm for discovering advanced thermoelectrics.

Kanatzidis and his team then created hierarchical structures that integrate the nanoscale with the mesoscale, and which further lower the thermal conductivity by scattering phonons not possible with the nanostructuring alone. To this the research team added electronic band structure engineering between the thermoelectric phase and a second nanostructuring phase, thereby raising the power factor. This led to a significant advance in ZT to 2.2 at 800 K.

For his discoveries, Kanatzidis obtained over 22 patents, and he has over 800 publications. After obtaining a BSc degree from Aristotle University in Greece, Kanatzidis received his PhD degree in chemistry from the University of Iowa in 1984. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University from 1985 to 1987, and moved to Northwestern in the fall of 2006 from Michigan State University where he was a University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry since 1987. He also holds an appointment at Argonne National Laboratory and is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Solid State Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and MRS. His other honors include the Morley Medal from the American Chemical Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize.