Naomi Halas

Naomi J. Halas is an American physicist and nano scientist. She is University Professor at Rice University and the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. She invented the first nanoparticle with tunable plasmonic resonances, which are controlled by their shape and structure, and has won numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field of nanophotonics and plasmonics. She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working for IBM.

Halas was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for nanoscale engineering of optical resonances and lineshapes.

She is a Fellow of Optica, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2019, she was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Halas was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, the National Academy of Sciences in 2013, and the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, the latter for nanoscale engineering of optical resonances and lineshapes. She was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2024.