Short biography
Rodney Ruoff is an American physical chemist and nanoscience researcher. He is one of the world experts on carbon materials including carbon nanostructures such as fullerenes, nanotubes, graphene, diamond, and has had pioneering discoveries on such materials and others. Ruoff received his B.S. in Chemistry from The University of Texas at Austin (1981) and his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at the University of Illinois-Urbana (1988). After a Fulbright Fellowship at the MPI fuer Stroemungsforschung in Goettingen, Germany (1989) and postdoctoral work at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (1990–91), Ruoff became a staff scientist in the Molecular Physics Laboratory at SRI International (1991-1996). He is currently UNIST Distinguished Professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), and the director of the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials (CMCM), an Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center located at UNIST in Korea.
Rod Ruoff and his research groups have made seminal contributions to developing new synthesis techniques and improving our understanding of properties of novel materials including nanostructures and 2D materials, especially novel carbon materials (graphene, diamond, nanotubes, sp3-sp2 hybrids, negative curvature carbon, carbon nanofoams, boron nitride allotropes, fullerenes, etc.). Some examples of pioneering studies, among others, include:(i) of the mechanics of C60, and of nanotubes, including pullout of inner shell with respect to outer shell of the nanotube, and of a connection between mechanical deformation and structure on the one hand, and chemical reactivity on the other;(ii) of solubility phenomena of fullerenes, nanotubes, and graphene;(iii) of carbon-encapsulated metal nanoparticles;(iv) of patterned graphite and thus micromechanically exfoliated graphene-like flakes;(v) of scaled growth of graphene on copper and copper-nickel foils (vi) of isotopically labeled graphites (graphite oxide) and graphene;(vii) of graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide and composites and paper-like films composed of them; (viii) of the use of chemically modified graphene and graphite foam for electrode materials in electrical energy storage; (ix) of graphene as a support film for biological TEM;(x) of graphene as a protective coating against oxidation (and corrosion) was demonstrated earlier by others.
More recently, Ruoff and collaborators have demonstrated synthesis of large area monolayer graphene on copper foil by chemical vapor deposition, for which relatively high carrier mobilities have been obtained, and subsequently have used isotopic labeling and micro-Raman mapping to map grains and grain boundaries in such atom thick layers and to elucidate growth mechanisms, and studied their performance as transparent conductive electrodes. Ruoff and his collaborators have also made a series of advances in novel composite systems comprising chemically modified graphene platelets.