Executive Editors' Biographical Information

Robert H. Austin received his B.A. in Physics from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in 1976. He did a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry from 1976-1979 and has been at Princeton University in the Department from Physics from 1979 to the present, achieving the rank of Professor of Physics in 1989.
 
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA. He has served as a President of the Division of Biological Physics of the American Physical Society, and is the present Chair of the U.S. Liaison Committee of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. He has served as the biological physics editor for Physical Review Letters, serves on numerous review panels for NIH, NSF, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and NIST, and was the Editor of the Virtual Journal of Biological Physics (2000-2012). He won the 2005 Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society.

Vin Crespi is Distinguished Professor of Physics, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in physics at UC Berkeley, and joined the faculty at Penn State in 1997. He is currently the Director of the Penn State Materials Research Science and Engineering Center. His research covers a broad range of condensed matter theory, from simple analytical models to large-scale computation. Topics of research include mechanical and electronic properties of semiconducting and metallic nanostructures, superconductivity, surface science, semiconductor alloys, energy storage, magnetic frustration, molecular and catalytic motors, photonic materials, phyllotaxis and self-assembly.

A.T. Charlie Johnson is a Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. in Physics from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University. He did postdoctoral fellowships at the Delft University of Technology (Applied Physics) and NIST (Cryoelectronic Metrology). His honors include the Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for distinguished teaching at Penn, the Jack Raper Outstanding Technology Directions Paper Award of the International Solid State Circuit Conference, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Dr. Johnson’s research is focused on the nano-scale transport properties (charge, energy, spin, etc.) of nanostructures and single molecules, including carbon nanotubes, graphene, DNA, synthetic proteins, and other biomolecules. He is particularly interested in the physical properties of hybrid nanostructures and their use in molecular sensing. Other research interests include the development of scanning probe techniques for electronic property measurement of nanomaterials and nanodevices, molecular electronics and nanogaps, local probes of nanoscale systems, and nanotube and nanowire electronics.

Masaaki Tanaka is a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering & Information Systems, Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the University of Tokyo, in 1989. In 1992, he joined Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) at Red Bank, New Jersey, in USA, as a visiting research scientist. From 1994 to the present, he has been at the University of Tokyo as an associate professor and professor.

Professor Tanaka's main research field is "Spin-Electronics" or "Spintronics", in which the spin degrees of freedom are utilized in artificially synthesized materials. Among the areas of specific research are epitaxial growth, structural characterizations, electronic/optical/magnetic/spin-related properties (in particular, spin-dependent transport and mageto-optical properties), and device applications of various new structures. The following are some structures and devices being worked on: Ferromagnetic metal / semiconductor hybrid structures, III-V based magnetic semiconductors and their heterostructures, group-IV based magnetic semiconductors, ferromagnetic nanoparticles & semiconductor hybrid heterostructures, delta doping of magnetic impurities in semiconductor heterostructures, and new spin transistors (eg. spin-MOSFET) and reconfigurable logic devices.

Professor Enge G. Wang is the Professor of Physics at Peking University and an Academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Wang’s research focuses on surface physics; the approach is a combination of atomistic simulation of nonequilibrium growth, chemical vapor deposition of light-element nanomaterials, and water behaviors in confinement system. He and his coworkers also predicted a three-dimensional Ehrlich-Schwoebel barrier; attracted News and Views in Nature (June 2002). Another contribution is the model proposal and experimental validation of a true upward atomic diffusion; attracted Physics News Update in June 2003 and News and Views in Nature as well as Science Week in June 2004.

His work on the water-surface coupling and the strength of the hydrogen bonds at the interfaces provides a fundamental understanding of water on surface at molecular level.