If he cared more about the limelight, Jagdish Narayan would have made some different choices.
A wizard of the fundamental science that underlies electronic miniaturization, Mr. Narayan has turned aside various offers from major research institutions to stay at North Carolina State University. Primarily it’s because the Raleigh area reminds him of his small hometown in India.
And yet as he keeps piling up the inventions and awards, his relative obscurity in wider society worries him. Not because he craves attention for himself, but because he fears that a dearth of public appreciation for his type of talent may cost his adopted country its scientific pre-eminence.
“Our value system is somehow not giving enough credit to science and innovative thinking,” he says. “Kids don’t think it’s cool to be a good thinker.”
Mr. Narayan should know. With his stat sheet—more than 500 journal papers and 11,000 citations, 35 patents, at least a dozen major awards and honors, and the fastest-ever combined master’s and doctorate from a major research university—he might be the Michael Jordan of microelectronics. And yet he doesn’t even have a page on Wikipedia.
His latest honor is the 2011 Acta Materialia Gold Medal and Prize, a top international award for work in materials science. He won it for critical discoveries about the ways that minute variations in the atomic structure of materials affect their electrical and optical properties. His breakthroughs matter in areas like high-density computer memory and high-efficiency lighting.
One of his most recent major innovations involves using pulsed laser beams to guide the arrangements of the layers of atoms in a material. An industry partner is using the technique to build a new generation of light-emitting diodes, for use in flashlights, traffic signals, and brake lights.
Eventually the method could mean computer storage chips that require only a few hundred atoms for each bit of information, allowing the storage of about 250 million pages of data on a chip measuring less than a half-inch on each side.
“He’s definitely a pillar in the materials-science community,” says John C.C. Fan, president of the Kopin Corporation, a company founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is using Mr. Narayan’s stable of discoveries to develop new-generation lighting as well as solar cells and other forms of semiconductors.
Like many foreign students, in his youth Mr. Narayan had to match his intelligence with persistence, creativity, and luck just to walk in the door of the American research community. His hometown, Ghatampur, in northern India, happened to be near the U.S.-affiliated campus of the Indian Institutes of Technology, a product of the country’s post-World War II development strategy.
He studied there with professors provided by MIT and the University of California at Berkeley. “We really got a top education,” he says. That led, at age 22 in 1969, to scholarship offers from both Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, in England. He wanted to go to America but had to persuade his father, who was more familiar with India’s colonial ruler, Britain, by showing him that Berkeley was rated by the National Research Council as the world’s top research institution.
From there his scientific talent took over. Using a scanning electron microscope at Berkeley, he made crucial discoveries on the atomic level about how the electrical properties of a material can be transformed by adding tiny amounts of another material. “That basic study,” Mr. Narayan says, “led me to design new materials, new processes.”
So great were the implications that he finished his master’s degree and doctorate in one year each. “He is a scientific talent par excellence,” says Subhash Mahajan, coordinating editor of Acta Materialia and a professor of materials engineering at Arizona State University, who met Mr. Narayan at Berkeley after completing his own doctorate there.
Mr. Narayan’s groundbreaking discoveries include the fact that single-atom vacancies in materials typically occur in positively and negatively charged pairs, and the fact that the energy-storage properties of a tiny amount of a material are heavily determined by changes in its thickness.
That knowledge is the fruit of his unrelenting curiosity about the world. He hit upon the idea of using pulsed laser beams to line up atoms in ultrathin slices of a material as he was walking on the beach with his wife and pondering the way in which a gentle breeze determines the shape of ripples left by tides on the sand.
Such “fun” explorations in science and engineering can be made only by students who get beyond the basic stages of technical comprehension, Mr. Narayan says. But he worries that today’s distracted college students, who study by “cramming,” will never reach that level of understanding.
The confusion of priorities is evident to Mr. Narayan from two recent events at North Carolina State: a signing ceremony for a new basketball recruit that attracted hundreds of students, and a reception for the new chancellor, where, he says, by comparison, “hardly anybody showed up.” Another recent example involved his son, who got only a small mention in the local newspaper after winning a National Merit Scholarship, then had his picture in the paper the following week for finishing third in a cross-country race.
“Sports is good—good for your brain, good for your body,” Mr. Narayan says. “But you cannot be spending so much time that you do not have time for science and math.”
His colleagues, in turn, wonder about Mr. Narayan’s own priorities, he acknowledges, given his persistent loyalty to North Carolina State, which the National Science Foundation ranks only 74th in the nation in federal research spending. A major reason for staying, he says, is that the size feels comfortable. Another is that the university treats him well and provides whatever resources he needs.
And another is the sense of accomplishment. Through 27 years at North Carolina State, Mr. Narayan has developed seven graduate courses and taught at least 55 Ph.D. students, many of whom have now won their own science awards. “I have stayed here,” he says, “because I can do more good.”
