Future: Materials Science

C.N.R. Rao is the Linus Pauling Research Professor and Honorary President of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India, which he founded in 1989.

Prof. Rao is one of the world’s foremost solid-state and materials chemists. He has made prolific and sustained contributions to the development of the field over five decades. His work on transition metal oxides has led to basic understanding of novel phenomena and the relationship between materials properties and the structural chemistry of these materials.

Prof. Rao was one of the earliest to synthesize two-dimensional oxide materials such as La2CuO4. His work has led to a systematic study of compositionally controlled metal-insulator transitions. Such studies have had a profound impact on application fields such as colossal magneto resistance and high temperature superconductivity. Oxide semiconductors have shown unusual promise.

C.N.R. Rao has a sustained record of accomplishments in one of the most important fields of materials science and solid-state chemistry.

He has won several international prizes and is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences and of the Royal Society (London).