The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has selected Seth Marder to receive a Humboldt Research Award. The award recognizes a researcher’s entire achievements to date. Recipients are academics whose fundamental discoveries, theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Marder is Regents Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Georgia Power Chair in Energy Efficiency. He is also the 2018 recipient of Georgia Tech’s highest honor, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.

Marder is internationally recognized for leadership in developing structure-property relationships for organic and metallo-organic materials for optical and electronic applications.

He created a class of extremely efficient two-photon-absorbing materials, which enabled two-photon 3D microfabrication, now a global commercial technology.

He contributed to the development of organic electronic materials. In particular he created dopants that convert semiconductors to materials with substantial conductivities. 

In Georgia Tech, Marder advances materials science research and engineering through STAMI – the Center for the Science and Technology of Materials and Interfaces. The center supports the activities of researchers across Georgia Tech to create the next generations of functional materials and interfaces.

Humboldt Research Award recipients can spend up to one year in a research institution in Germany to collaborate on a project. Physicist Norbert Koch will host Marder at the Department of Physics of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

“I am gratified and humbled to receive this prestigious award,” Marder says. “It allows me to spend time working with Professor Koch and his group, with their state-of-the art instrumentation and unique expertise."

In Berlin, Marder hopes to develop new experiments to address electrical doping of organic materials and interfaces, which are key in applications such as organic light-emitting diodes and photovoltaic materials and devices.

Marder is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Optical Society of America, the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, and the National Academy of Inventors.