Mercouri Kanatzidis has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Mercouri Kanatzidis has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. He is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the department of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He has a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory.

When announcing this year’s new members, Academy President David W. Oxtoby said, “With the election of these members, the academy is honoring excellence, innovation and leadership and recognizing a broad array of stellar accomplishments. We hope every new member celebrates this achievement and joins our work advancing the common good.”

The academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good.

The academy’s dual mission remains essentially the same 240 years later with honorees from increasingly diverse fields and with the work now focused on the arts and humanities, democracy and justice, education, global affairs and science.

Kanatzidis’ research focuses on solid-state chemistry, the science of synthesis for chalcogenides and intermetallics materials, the advancement of thermoelectric materials and their applications. He made seminal contributions in hybrid perovskite materials for solar cells and hard radiation detectors.

He invented chalcogels, a class of materials built like a sponge with the ability to soak up radionuclides and heavy metals from wastewater. Kanatzidis is the founder of Actinia, a startup company developing cutting-edge radiation detector materials for common imaging techniques used in medicine as well as security and testing.