Research Expertise and Interest

processing of complex oxide heterostructures, spin-charge coupling, nanoscale characterization/device structures, thin film growth and materials physics of complex oxides, materials processing for devices, information technologies

Research Description

Professor Ramesh graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.  He returned to Berkeley in 2004 and is currently the Purnendu Chatterjee Chair Professor in Materials Science and Physics. From 1989-1995, at Bellcore, he initiated research in several key areas of oxide electronics, including ferroelectric nonvolatile memories.  His landmark contributions in ferroelectrics came through the recognition that conducting oxide electrodes are the solution to the problem of polarization fatigue, which for 30 years, remained an enigma and unsolved problem. In 1994, in collaboration with S. Jin (Lucent Technologies), he initiated research into manganite thin films and they coined the term, Colossal Magnetoresistive (CMR) Oxides. He initiated pioneering research into multiferroic oxides at Maryland. At Berkeley, he continues to pursue key scientific and technological problems in complex multifunctional oxide thin films, nanostructures and heterostructures. His group demonstrated the existence of a large ferroelectric polarization in multiferroic BiFeO3 films, in agreement with first principle predictions; they also demonstrated electric field control of antiferromagnetism as well as ferromagnetism, a critical step towards the next generation of ultralow power storage and spintronics devices that are completely electric field controlled. He has published extensively on the synthesis and materials physics of complex oxide materials and his work is highly cited (over 65,000 citations, H-factor =110).  He is a fellow of APS, AAAS & MRS. He has been recognized with a Humboldt Senior Scientist Prize, The American Physical Society’s David Adler Lectureship and the James McGroddy Prize, the TMS Bardeen Prize and the IUPAP Magnetism Prize and Neel Medal. In 2014, he was recognized as a Thomson-Reuters Citation Laureate in Physics for his work on multiferroics. In 2011, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.From December 2010 to August 2012 he served as the Founding Director of the SunShot Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy, overseeing and coordinating the R&D activities and funding (300M$/year) of the U.S. Solar Program. From July 2013 to August 2014, he was the deputy lab director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and from August 2014 to August 2018 he served as the associate laboratory director for Energy Technologies at LBNL.