October 7, 1996

Physicist Sue Carter captures $500,000 Packard Fellowship

For the third year in a row, a UCSC faculty member has earned one of the most sought-after awards for young American scientists: a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, worth $100,000 per year for five years.

This year's recipient is assistant professor of physics Sue Carter, who came to UCSC in April. She is among twenty recipients of the 1996 Packard Fellowships, which recognize scientists who have shown unusual creative abilities in the first three years of their academic careers.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation of Los Altos awards $10 million per year to support the research of 100 active fellows. The 1996 winners represent institutions such as MIT, Caltech, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and five UC campuses: UCLA, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz.

Only four institutions have received a Packard Fellowship each year for the last three years: Caltech, the University of Chicago, UCSF, and UCSC.

Carter studies the chemical and physical properties of substances that could form the next generation of materials in microelectronics and optical displays. Today's TV and computer screens, semiconductors, and other technologies rely on inorganic materials, such as silicon. However, Carter studies the relationship between structure and electrical properties in mixtures of inorganic and organic (carbon-based) compounds. Such substances offer a tantalizing promise: the durability and reliability of traditional inorganics combined with the flexibility and environmental advantages of the atoms and molecules that compose living things.

"The next generation of optoelectronic materials almost certainly will be both organically and inorganically based," Carter says. "Each type of material has limitations and advantages, and the key is to combine the best of both."

Carter creates her own inorganic-organic composites in her lab. She examines the behaviors of long strings, or polymers, of the composites under different conditions of temperature, chemical composition, and ultraviolet light. Of particular interest are the shapes, sizes, and orientation of the particles, as well as their reactions to electrical impulses. Eventual applications include new technologies for information storage, light-emitting diodes, and liquid-crystal displays.

Carter will use her $500,000 award to hire a new postdoctoral researcher and graduate research assistants. She also will purchase a sophisticated instrument called a scanning tunneling microscope, which can take images on the scale of individual molecules.

Carter, age 30, earned her B.A. magna cum laude in physics, chemistry, and mathematics from Kalamazoo College and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago. She has worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories-Lucent Technologies and IBM's Almaden Research Center, near San Jose.

Preceding Carter as Packard Fellows at UCSC were two members of the Center for the Molecular Biology of RNA: biochemist Joseph Puglisi in 1994 and molecular biologist Charles Wilson in 1995.

--Robert Irion