Awardee Interviews | Biography: Dr. Charles S. Fadley
Dr. Charles S. Fadley
Charles S. Fadley of Norwalk, Ohio, completed a B.S. in Chemical Engineering at MIT in 1963 with Dean's List Honors and election to three honorary academic fraternities: Phi Lambda Upsilon (chemistry), Tau Beta Pi (engineering), and Sigma Xi (science). At the University of California at Berkeley he earned an M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1965 and, under David A. Shirley's direction, a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics in 1970.
He served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate under Stig Hagstrom at the Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, during 1970-71, and as a Senior Lecturer in Physics at Dar es Salaam University in Tanzania during 1971-72. During 19 years at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu he became Professor of Chemistry, punctuated by appointments as Visiting Professor at the University of Paris and at the French synchrotron radiation facility LURE. In 1991 he took up an Advanced Light Source Professorship that is joint between the UC Davis Physics Department and the LBNL Materials Sciences Division. The National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, NATO, and now the Department of Energy have supported his research.
His graduate research in Berkeley involved the first U.S. Ph.D. dealing with x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy applied to solids and surfaces. He has pioneered new developments in its use, including angle-resolved XPS for surface depth profiling, photoelectron diffraction as a probe of atomic structure and magnetic order, the possibility of holographically imaging atoms near surfaces, and most recently, the use of soft x-ray standing waves to study buried interfaces. Since 1975, his group has used synchrotron radiation at Stanford, LURE, and now ALS and ESRF. His most recent work combines photoelectron, x-ray emission, and x-ray absorption spectroscopies in studying surfaces and buried interfaces of magnetic materials.
He has taught undergraduate and graduate chemistry and physics courses and supervised 31 Ph.D. and 3 M.S. theses. Five former students are involved in higher education. He has also supervised 27 postdoctoral research associates from 12 countries; 7 of these have become professors. Other graduates from his group occupy research positions in leading laboratories worldwide.
He and his group have written over 250 papers and book chapters, and he has given over 140 invited lectures at conferences, workshops, and research-related schools involving a total of 25 countries. He has also received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, Fellow of AVS, a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and a Fellow of the UK Institute of Physics. He has served the scientific community as chair or vice-chair of several international conferences (Vacuum Ultraviolet Radiation Physics, Electron Spectroscopy and Structure) and as chair or member of various governing or review committees.