Thomas Ebbesen

Thomas W. Ebbesen is a physical chemist born in Oslo, Norway. He was educated in the United States and France, receiving his bachelor degree from Oberlin College (USA) and his PhD from the Curie University in Paris. He then did research in both the US and Japan, most notably at NEC Corp., before returning to France in 1999 to help build a new institute (ISIS) at the University of Strasbourg.  He is currently the head of the Center for Frontier Research in Chemistry and the Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies (www.usias.fr). He holds the chair of physical chemistry of light-matter interactions. The author of many papers and patents, Ebbesen has received numerous awards for his pioneering research including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience. Over the past 15 years, his team made the first demonstrations that chemistry and ground state material properties can be modified by coupling electronic and vibrational transitions to the vacuum field.