Paul L. McEuen, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics and director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell, has been named director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics (LASSP), starting July 1.

"Paul's research experience and his membership in LASSP for more than a decade will be invaluable as he takes on new responsibilities as its director," said Robert A. Buhrman, Cornell's John Edson Sweet Professor of Engineering and senior vice provost for research. "One of his first tasks will be to supervise the move of LASSP faculty and laboratories to the new Physical Sciences Building. He will also engage in strategic planning for LASSP's scientific future."

McEuen is a leading researcher in the science of nanostructures and their application in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. His group has conducted seminal studies in electrical and mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes, quantum dots and single molecules. Recently he has discovered that single photons can create multiple electron-hole pairs in carbon-nanotube photodiodes, suggesting a new strategy for enhancing efficiency in photovoltaic devices.

McEuen was awarded the Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize in Condensed Matter Physics in 2001. He has served on the executive committee of the Center for Nanoscale Systems since 2002, and he leads interdisciplinary research groups in the Cornell Center for Materials Research and the Center for Nanoscale Systems. He was appointed Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics in 2008 and director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science in 2010.

"I am thrilled to have the opportunity to serve and thank the previous director, Dan Ralph, for his excellent stewardship," McEuen said. "These are exciting times for our laboratory -- we have wonderful new faculty members, great staff, a fantastic new building and an explosion of exciting research directions to explore. The future of condensed matter and atomic physics at Cornell is very bright."

LASSP is a major center for research in the area of theoretical and experimental condensed-matter physics, biological physics and optics. More than 30 physics faculty members at Cornell are associated with the laboratory, which was founded in 1959. In the 1970s, three members of LASSP, Robert C. Richardson, David M. Lee and Douglas D. Osheroff, discovered the superfluidity of the light isotope of helium (He-3), for which they received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1996.