City University of Hong Kong to award four leading business and academic figures with honorary doctoral degrees#
Professor Herbert Gleiter, a distinguished researcher in physics and nanotechnology, will receive an Honorary Doctor of Science. Professor Gleiter obtained his PhD in physics from the University of Stuttgart in 1966. During his work at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he discovered the existence of dislocations in inter-crystalline interfaces and proposed the structural unit model of grain boundaries, which provides the basis for today’s grain boundary models. In the late 1970s, he pioneered a new class of materials: nano-crystalline materials. The idea of these new materials was to create solids consisting of a large volume fraction of inter-crystalline boundaries between crystallites with the same or different chemical compositions. As the arrangements of atoms in interfaces differ from the ones in crystals and glasses, nano-materials were expected to open the way to solids with new atomic structures and hence new properties.
Professor Gleiter’s contributions have been cited more than 22,000 times and have achieved the highest citation impact score in Materials Science in Germany and in Europe. Throughout his career, he has received more than 40 prizes and awards, including the Leibniz Prize, the Max Planck Research Award, the Acta Materialia Gold Medal, and the Edward DeMille Campbell Award. He is a member of seven National Academies and awarded several honorary professorships and doctorates. Nanjing University of Science and Technology founded a new research institute working on nano-science named after him and appointed him Founding Director of the Herbert Gleiter Institute of Nanoscience.”
The award ceremony will take place on November 21, 2015.
