Alexandra Navrotsky, the director of the Navrotsky Eyring Center for Materials of the Universe and a Regents Professor in the School of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University, has been awarded the Czochralski Medal from the European Materials Research Society, their highest honor for lifetime research achievement in materials science.
Professor Jan Czochralski was one of Poland’s most famous scientists. In 1916, after serendipitously dipping a pen into a small crucible of molten aluminum instead of an inkwell, and withdrawing it, he noticed that a thread of aluminum hung from the nib. The thread of aluminum turned out to be a single crystal, and so the Czochralski method for single-crystal growth was born. His method is currently used for the growth of single crystals of germanium and silicon, which are the basis of a vast range of modern electronic equipment and devices.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Navrotsky began her academic career at Arizona State University in 1969. She left in 1985 for Princeton University and then served as the Edward Roessler Chair in Mathematical and Physical Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Professor of Ceramic, Earth, and Environmental Materials Chemistry at the University of California, Davis. She rejoined the faculty at Arizona State in 2019.
By advancing high- and low-temperature reaction calorimetry as a foundational research tool, Dr. Navrotsky has contributed to a broad spectrum of applications, from mineral thermodynamics to ceramic processing to zeolites. She has published more than 900 scientific papers. In 2019, a new mineral was discovered in the Blue Lizard mine in Red Canyon in southeastern Utah. It was named navrotskyite in honor of Professor Navrotsky.
Professor Navrotsky holds bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago.