February 7, 2011
by Benjamin White

After tallying the votes, it became official: Ohio University physics professor Arthur Smith will serve his third consecutive three-year term as NQPI's director.

Smith, who has been a member of NQPI since its inception in 2001, says he took some convincing to give the demanding position a third go-around.

“It has been a tremendous amount of work,” admits Smith, who joined Ohio University's Department of Physics and Astronomy in July 1998. He also heads the school's NSF SPIRE international collaborative campaign, which connects OU with the University of Hamburg in Germany and the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina to study nanospintronics and nanomagnetism. As well as the two directorships, Smith is also a member of OU's Condensed Matter and Surface Science Program and teaches graduate and undergraduate classes.

Few would have foreseen the success NQPI would become when it was launched in 2001 as part of the university's nanoscience initiative within its Doctoral Enhancement plan. With Smith as its second director, beginning in 2005, NQPI won $169,000 annually in base funding in OU's GERB competition, and established an international presence three years later when OU hosted the biannual International Workshop on Nanoscale Spectroscopy and Nanotechnology. Several of its members have been awarded lucrative and prestigious grants for their research.

In the future, Smith hopes to continue to build the name of NQPI, attract more funding and obtain a new building on campus dedicated to nanoscience. His goals also include increased mentoring of younger faculty and to establish a “nanocore” curriculum, a series of graduate classes which will be team-taught by NQPI faculty.

Smith, who obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, has experienced much success in nanoscience, from receiving the U.S. Presidential Early CAREER Award in Science and Engineering in 2000 to obtaining an image of a Gallium Nitride spiral that was featured on the cover of Science in 1998. All in all, Smith has received about $5 million in external grants for research and collaborations.

An election was held for the position, but Smith was the only NQPI member to run.