KAUST Vice President for Research and Distinguished Professor of Materials Physics & Device Engineering Donal Bradley was recently honored by the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) for achievements in advanced materials science.

Bradley received the 2019 Jan Czochralski Award in a ceremony in Warsaw, Poland, also delivering a plenary lecture—titled "Tuning Conjugated Polymer Electronic and Optical Properties via Physical Structure and Environment"—as a Czochralski laureate.

The Czochralski Award is given in honor of world-renowned chemist Jan Czochralski, whose research led to the growth of large-volume single-crystal silicon boules—a foundational technology for the modern-day semiconductor industry, yielding the vast majority of the computer processors we use today.

"It's a tremendous honor to be recognized by this award," Bradley said. "Jan Czochralski is Poland's most highly cited academic and the inventor of a process that has had a profound impact not only on science but on computing in general—and also the way we communicate as human beings. To be honored in his name is a wonderful privilege."

Bradley is the 16th recipient of the Czochralski Award. He joins an eminent list of Czochralski Award laureates, including 2014 Nobel Prize winner Shuji Nakamura. Bradley joined KAUST from the University of Oxford in April 2019 following the departure of the University's former Vice President of Research and King Faisal Prize winner Jean M. J. Fréchet.

"This award adds to the list of impressive acknowledgements for Dr. Bradley on the global stage, and we are proud that he accepted this award as a member of the KAUST leadership team," KAUST President Tony Chan said.

Along with his responsibilities at KAUST, Bradley is a visiting professor at Oxford and the Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research. Bradley is the former recipient of the EU Descartes Prize (2003); SID Jan Rajchman prize (2005); ESF European Latsis Prize (2005); IOP Faraday Medal (2009); IET Faraday Medal (2010); RS Bakerian Medal (2010); and Jiangsu Governor's Prize (2016). He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 2004 and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010 for services to science.

Bradley is a co-inventor of conjugated polymer electroluminescence (1989) and a co-founder of Cambridge Display Technology Ltd (1990). In 2001, he co-founded Molecular Vision Ltd to develop novel polymer detection systems for microanalysis applications. Most recently (2019), he co-founded PeroLED Ltd, a perovskite-based lighting and display company. He also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield (2014) and Hong Kong Baptist University (2017).

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Originally published by KAUST News.