Nancy A. Burnham

Biography

Education: BA Colgate University 1980 MS University of Colorado, Boulder 1985 PhD University of Colorado, Boulder 1987 Nancy Burnham graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1987 with a Ph.D. in Physics. Her dissertation concerned the surface analysis of photovoltaic materials. As a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory, she became interested in scanning probe microscopy, in particular its application to detecting material properties at the nanoscale. After three years as a von Humboldt Fellow in Germany at Forschungszentrum Juelich, she spent another six years in Europe, principally at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, all the while pursuing the mechanical properties of nanostructures and instrumentation for nanomechanics. Her international experience also includes sejours at the University of Bordeaux, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She became an Associate Professor of Physics at WPI in January of 2000 and affiliated Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in 2012. Invited, tutorial, or plenary speaker at over 40 conferences, author or co-author of over 70 publications with nearly 9,000 citations (h-index 34), she is as well active in professional societies as, e.g., Treasurer of the Nanoscience and Technology Division of the AVS. She was the recipient of the 2001 Nanotechnology Recognition Award from the latter organization, was a 2002 Institute of Physics of Ireland Lecturer, and became a Fellow of the AVS in 2010. Two of her articles were featured among the 25 highlighted publications for the 25th anniversary of the journal Nanotechnology in 2014 out of nearly 12,000 articles.

Research Interest

Mechanical properties of nanostructures; Interpretation of probe microscopy data; Instrumentation and metrology for nanomechanics