Ajayan Pulickel earned a B. Tech in metallurgical engineering from Banaras Hindu University in 1985 and a PhD in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University in 1989. After three years of post-doctoral experience at NEC Corporation in Japan, he spent two years as a research scientist at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Orsay, in France and nearly a year and a half as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Metallforschung, Stuttgart, in Germany. In 1997, he joined the materials science and engineering faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) as an assistant professor and was the Henri Burlage chair Professor in Engineering until he left RPI in 2007. He joined the mechanical engineering and materials science department of Rice University, as the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering in July 2007. Since 2014, he has served as the founding chair of the new department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University.

Dr. Pulickel’s research interests include synthesis and structure-property relations of nanostructures and nanocomposites, materials science and applications of nanomaterials, energy storage, and phase stability in nanoscale systems. He is one of the pioneers in the field of carbon nanotubes. He has published one book and more than 1,000 journal papers.