David Tománek

David Tománek (born July 1954) is a U.S.-Swiss physicist of Czech origin and researcher in nanoscience and nanotechnology. He is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Michigan State University. He is known for predicting the structure and calculating properties of surfaces, atomic clusters including the C60 buckminsterfullerene, nanotubes, nanowires and nanohelices, graphene, and two-dimensional materials including phosphorene.

Academic career Tománek earned a doctoral degree in Physics from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1983 under the supervision of Karl Heinz Bennemann and became Hochschulassistent there in 1984. Between 1985 and 1987 he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Bell Labs at the Department of Physics and Astronomy. including collective electronic excitations and superconductivity. His computational studies of growth regimes of silicon and carbon clusters have made use of the semi-quantitative Linear Combination of Atomic Orbitals (LCAO) or tight-binding method. formation, mechanical stiffness, their ability to conduct heat and electrons, and field electron emission.

After 2000, he got involved in studies of two-dimensional materials including phosphorene. In the following years, he has continued identifying applications of carbon nanotubes and two-dimensional materials in fields including low-resistance contacts to nanostructures, nanomechanical energy storage, and purification and desalination of water.

Conferences Tománek initiated a series of annual Nanotube (NT) conferences

Honors and awards In 2004 Tománek was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in 2005 he received the prestigious Alexander-von-Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (Germany). In 2008 he received the Japan Carbon Award for Life-Time Achievement and was chosen by the American Physical Society as member of the Outstanding Referees Program for excellence in peer review. In 2016 he received the Lee Hsun Research Award for Materials Science from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His h-index is currently 85.