Narayan to serve on NAI Fellows Advisory Committee

Dr. Jagdish Narayan, John C. C. Fan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University, has been elected to serve on the 2017 Fellows Advisory Committee for the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Members of the committee will work closely with NAI staff to review nominees for the next class of NAI Fellows.

Narayan, who was elected as an NAI Fellow in 2014, will be formally inducted as a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 8, 2017.

Narayan invented domain matching epitaxy (DME), which is based upon matching of integral multiples of lattice planes across the film-substrate interface, to address epitaxial growth of heterostructures across the misfit scale. In the late 1970s, he pioneered the concept of solute trapping in semiconductors by his discoveries of laser annealing and the formation of supersaturated semiconductor alloys. Narayan also invented integrated smart sensors and 3-D self-assembled nanostructures with oriented magnetic nanodots formed by the DME paradigm for information storage.

In 2015, Narayan announced the invention of a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, that is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond and can be used to produce diamond at room temperature and at ambient air pressure. The Q-carbon is harder than diamond and shows high-temperature superconductivity upon doping with boron.

He is a fellow of the Materials Research Society; the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society; MRS; NAS; AAAS; APS; and ASM International. He is a winner of the Acta Materialia Gold Medal, the ASM Gold Medal, the TMS RF Mehl Gold Medal and the North Carolina Award in Science, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the state of North Carolina.

The NAI was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society.