Thirumalai Venkatesan

Thirumalai Venkatesan is a Professor of Physics and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Oklahoma and holds affiliations with NIST Gaithersburg. He serves as the founding Director of the Center of Optimal Materials for Emerging Technologies (COMET) and previously led the Nano Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUSNNI). With over 800 publications and 34 patents, he is globally recognized as a top physicist with an h-index of 118. His research focuses on condensed matter physics, materials science, and their applications in memristors, meta-surfaces, plasmonics, quantum technologies, and biomedical diagnostics.

Education: B.S. (1969), M.S. (1971) from Indian Institute of Technology; Ph.D. (1977) from City University of New York and Bell Labs. Career highlights include roles at Bell Labs, Bellcore, University of Maryland, and NUS. He is a Fellow of prestigious institutions like the Royal Society, APS, and MRS, and has received awards such as the George E. Pake Prize (2012) and Distinguished Lectureship Award (APS, 2020).

Research interests span electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of materials, with emphasis on inorganic films, oxide heterostructures, neuromorphic circuits, and breath-based disease detection. He has advised over 56 PhD students and 35 postdocs, many of whom became entrepreneurs. Venkatesan founded companies like Neocera and co-founded Blue Wave Semiconductors, contributing to PLD technology and magnetic imaging systems.

Key scientific contributions include inventing pulsed laser deposition (PLD), discovering antiferromagnetic skyrmions at room temperature, and pioneering breathomics for lung cancer detection. His work bridges academia and industry, with significant impact on advanced materials, sensors, and biomedical applications.