Laurence D. Marks

Laurence Daniel Marks (born July 4, 1954) is an American physicist. He is a professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University. He has contributed to the study of nanoparticles and worked in the fields of electron microscopy, diffraction, and crystallography.

Early life and education Marks attended Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon, England. He played chess competitively for the school and won the British Chess Championship Under 21 in 1973.

Marks graduated from King's College, Cambridge, with a B.A. in chemistry in 1976. From 1976 to 1980, he was a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where he worked with Archibald Howie on electron microscopy and the structure of metal crystals. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1980.

Career From 1980 to 1983, Marks was a post-doctoral research assistant at the Cavendish Laboratory.

Marks was promoted to professor in June 1992. In 2019, he was a senior visiting scientist with the Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics (SINANO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As of September 2023, Marks is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University.

Starting from his PhD work, he studied nanotwinning, leading toward a way to directly image the atomic scale of nano-surfaces. One of his early research efforts led to the discovery of a type of nanoparticle now known as the Marks decahedron. including new methods to solve surface structures as well as using these instruments to discover phenomena such as graphitic materials on hip implants. He also studies how static electricity is generated by rubbing, a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect.

Awards and honors In 1989, Marks received the Burton Award from the Microscopy Society of America for achievements in the fields of microscopy and microanalysis by a scientist under 40 years of age.

Marks was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001, for his "contributions to quantitative imaging and diffraction methods for determining the atomic structure of surfaces and bulk materials", and a fellow of the Microscopy Society of America in 2017.

Selected publications