Alan J. Heeger

Alan J. Heeger (born January 22, 1936) is an American physicist and chemist best known for co-discovering and developing conductive polymers, a breakthrough that revolutionized materials science by enabling plastics to conduct electricity like metals or semiconductors. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for this work, which began in the late 1970s with experiments on doped polyacetylene that demonstrated metallic conductivity in organic materials.

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Jewish parents from immigrant families from Russia, Heeger grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, after his family moved there following his father's early death; he completed high school early and earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from the University of Nebraska in 1957. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961 under Alan Portis, focusing on experimental solid-state physics. Early in his career, Heeger joined the University of Pennsylvania as a faculty member in 1962, where he conducted groundbreaking research on organic conductors like TTF-TCNQ and collaborated with MacDiarmid on the conductivity of polyacetylene, leading to the identification of solitons as charge carriers in these polymers.

Alan J. Heeger was born on January 22, 1936, in Sioux City, Iowa, into a Jewish family of Eastern European descent. His father had immigrated from Russia as a young child in 1904, while his mother was born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Jewish parents who had also emigrated from Russia to escape persecution and economic hardship.