Awardee Interviews | Biography: Patricia A. Thiel
Patricia A. Thiel
Prof. Patricia A. Thiel, Iowa State University, “for seminal contributions to the understanding of quasicrystaltine surfaces and thin-film nucleation and growth.”
Patricia A. Thiel is the John D. Corbett Professor of Chemistry and a distinguished professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. She is also a Faculty scientist in the Ames Laboratory. She is known for her research on the formation and evolution of nanostructures on surfaces, and surface properties and structures of quasicrystals. She earned in Chemistry at Macalester College in 1975, and her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1981. After postdoctoral work at the University of Munich as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, she joined the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, at Livermore, then moved to Iowa State Univer sity in 1983, where she was recognized with awards from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus foundation and the A. P. Sloan Foundation, and by an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. More recently, she has been elected a fellow of 4 major scientific societies. She has been an Invitation Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, has received an Honorary Degree from the Institut National polytechnic de Lorraine in France, and has received a DOE Award for Outstanding Scientific Accomplishment in Materials Chemistry In 2010, she received both the David J. Adler Lectureship Award from the American PhysicaI Society, and the Arthur W. Adamson Award from the American Chemical Society. She has served on numerous boards and committees for major scientific organizations, and has been a member of editorial advisory boards for 10 journals. She is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics. She has authored or edited about 300 scientific publications.