Andre Geim was born to Konstantin Alekseyevich Geim and Nina Nikolayevna Bayer in Sochi, Russia, on 21 October 1958. Both his parents were engineers of German origin; Geim says his maternal great-grandmother was Jewish. [23][24] His grandfather Nikolay N. Bayer (Mykola Baier in Ukrainian) was a notable public figure in Ukraine of the early 20th century, one of its first nature conservationists and the founder/first rector of Kaminiets-Podilskyi University.[25][26]
After earning his PhD with Victor Petrashov,[4] Geim worked as a research scientist at the Institute for Microelectronics Technology (IMT) at RAS, and from 1990 as a post-doctoral fellow at the universities of Nottingham (twice), Bath, and Copenhagen. He said that while at Nottingham he could spend his time on research rather than "swimming through Soviet treacle,"[23] and determined to leave the Soviet Union.[31]
He obtained his first tenured position in 1994, when he was appointed associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he worked on mesoscopicsuperconductivity.[32] He later gained Dutch citizenship. One of his doctoral students at Nijmegen was Konstantin Novoselov, who went on to become his main research partner. However, Geim has said that he had an unpleasant time during his academic career in the Netherlands.
He was offered professorships at Nijmegen and Eindhoven, but turned them down as he found the Dutch academic system too hierarchical and full of petty politicking. "This can be pretty unpleasant at times," he says. "It's not like the British system where every staff member is an equal quantity."[31] On the other hand, Geim writes in his Nobel lecture that "the situation was a bit surreal because outside the university walls I received a warm-hearted welcome from everyone around, including Jan Kees and other academics."[33] (Prof. Jan Kees Maan was the research boss of Geim during his time at Radboud University Nijmegen.)
In 2001 he became a professor of physics at the University of Manchester, and was appointed director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology in 2002. Geim's wife and long-standing co-author, Irina Grigorieva, also moved to Manchester as a lecturer in 2001. The same year, they were joined by Novoselov who moved to Manchester from Nijmegen, which awarded him a PhD in 2004. Geim served as Langworthy Professor between 2007 and 2013, leaving this endowed professorship to Novoselov in 2012.[30] Also, between 2007 and 2010 Geim was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow before becoming one of Royal Society Research Professors.[30][34]
Geim's achievements include the discovery of a simple method for isolating single atomic layers of graphite, known as graphene, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Manchester[36] and IMT. The team published their findings in October 2004 in Science.[37][38][39]
Graphene consists of one-atom-thick layers of carbonatoms arranged in two-dimensional hexagons,[40][41] and is the thinnest material in the world, as well as one of the strongest and hardest.[42] The material has many potential applications.
Geim said one of the first applications of graphene could be in the development of flexible touchscreens, and that he has not patented the material because he would need a specific application and an industrial partner.[43]
Geim also developed a biomimetic adhesive which became known as gecko tape[17]—so called because it works on the same principle as adhesion of gecko feet—research of which is still in the early stages.[44] It is hoped that the development will eventually allow humans to scale ceilings, like Spider-Man.[45]
Geim's research in 1997 into the possible effects of magnetism on water scaling led to the famous discovery of direct diamagnetic levitation of water, and led to a frog being levitated.[46] For this experiment, he and Michael Berry received the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize.[16] "We were asked first whether we dared to accept this prize, and I take pride in our sense of humor and self-deprecation that we did".[23]
He said of the range of subjects he has studied: "Many people choose a subject for their PhD and then continue the same subject until they retire. I despise this approach. I have changed my subject five times before I got my first tenured position and that helped me to learn different subjects."[29] "When one dares to try, rewards are not guaranteed but at least it is an adventure."[23]
Geim's research is notable for its internationally-recognised quality, originality and breadth. He has recently discovered a conceptually new class of materials strictly two-dimensional atomic crystals, including graphene. This has opened up a prolific research area including a new paradigm of "relativistic-like condensed matter", where relativistic quantum physics can be studied in a bench-top experiment. Previously, Geim pioneered ballistic Hall micromagnetometry and discovered a paramagnetic Meissner effect and new vortex physics in superconductors. He has also realised a microfabricated adhesive, based on the gecko's climbing mechanism, now being exploited by DuPont, BAe and TESA. His experiments at Nijmegen on magnetic levitation attracted worldwide media attention and stimulated international research in this field. His earlier research on mesoscopic physics included studies of non-local and interaction phenomena, and of the quantum motion of electrons in periodic and random magnetic fields. He disseminates science to the public and schoolchildren through broadcasts and "roadshow" lectures.[52]
By 2022, his Ig Nobel Prize-winning work on the magnetic levitation of a frog was reportedly part of the inspiration for China's lunar gravity research facility.[69][70]
Nobel Prize in Physics
On 5 October 2010, Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene".[71] Upon hearing of the award he said, "I'm fine, I slept well. I didn't expect the Nobel Prize this year", and that his plans for the day would not change.[72] The lecture for the award took place on 8 December 2010 at Stockholm University.[73] He said he hopes that graphene and other two-dimensional crystals will change everyday life as plastics did for humanity, although we need to wait for a few decades to see the results.[74]
Mark Miodownik said that his Ig Nobel Prize shows that people can still win a Nobel by "mucking about in a lab".[75] The awards made him the first person to win, as an individual, both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize.[76] On winning both the prizes, he has stated that
"Frankly, I value both my Ig Nobel prize and Nobel prize at the same level and for me Ig Nobel prize was the manifestation that I can take jokes, a little bit of self-deprecation always helps."[4]
2010, Geim was inducted into the Guinness World Records as the "First individual to win both a Nobel and Ig Nobel prize".[77]
Personal life
View and opinions
Geim was one of 38 Nobel laureates who signed a declaration in 2010 issued by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East protesting an international initiative to boycott Israeli academics, institutions, and research centers.[78]
At the Nobel Minds symposium in December 2010, Geim said the Nobel Peace Prize committee's choice of Chinese dissident, the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was patronising, saying
"Look at the people who give this Nobel prize. They are retired Norwegian politicians who have spent all their careers in a safe environment, in an oil-rich modern country. They try to extend their views of the world, how the world should work and how democracy works in another country. It's very, very patronising— they have not lived in these countries. In the past 10 years, China has developed not only economically, but even the strongest human rights supporter would agree also human rights have improved. Why do we need to distort this?"[79][80]
Geim has written several opinion pieces for The Financial Times, examples of which can be found on his university webpage.[81]
In 2014, Geim's interview for Desert Island Discs, a popular BBC radio programme, revealed details of his personal life and taste in music.[82]
A quote from Geim was deliberately doctored by the campaign group Vote Leave in the run-up to the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. An open letter about science, signed by 13 Conservative MPs including Boris Johnson, attempted to paint European science funding as unnecessarily bureaucratic and deliberately misrepresented Geim's views on Europe:
As the Nobel Prize winner Andre Geim said: 'I can offer no nice words for the EU framework programmes [for research] which ... can be praised only by Europhobes for discrediting the whole idea of an effectively working Europe.'
Geim has a complex ancestry which is described in detail in his Nobel Prize autobiography.[23] There, Geim stated that most of his family are ethnic Germans, his father descended from Volga Germans and his mother mostly an ethnic German as well. Both his father and paternal grandfather had spent many years of their lives as prisoners in Siberia in Stalin's Gulags, and "some of the family had been prisoners in German concentration camps". He also states that he "suffered from anti-Semitism in Russia because my name sounds Jewish".[84]
Geim summarises his identity as follows. "To the best of my knowledge, the only Jew in the family was my great-grandmother, with the rest on both sides being German. Having lived and worked in several European countries, I consider myself European and do not believe that any further taxonomy is necessary, especially in such a fluid world as the world of science."[23][85]
^Jiang, Da (2006). Fabrication, characterization and measurement of atomically thin carbon devices (PhD thesis). University of Manchester. OCLC643390338.
^"China building "Artificial Moon" that simulates low gravity with magnets". Futurism.com. Recurrent Ventures. Retrieved 17 January 2022. Interestingly, the facility was partly inspired by previous research conducted by Russian physicist Andrew Geim in which he floated a frog with a magnet. The experiment earned Geim the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics, a satirical award given to unusual scientific research. It's cool that a quirky experiment involving floating a frog could lead to something approaching an honest-to-God antigravity chamber.