Chad Mirkin

Director, International Institute for Nanotechnology

Chad A. Mirkin is an American chemist and a pioneer of nanoscience. He is Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University and the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, with additional professorships in chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering, and medicine. He received his BS from Dickinson College in 1986 and his PhD from Penn State University in 1989, and was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT before joining Northwestern as a professor in 1991. He is credited with the discovery of spherical nucleic acids and the founding of structural nanomedicine, with the development of Dip-Pen Nanolithography and related cantilever-free patterning methods, and with contributions to nanoparticle synthesis and supramolecular chemistry. He has authored more than 930 manuscripts, filed over 1,400 patent applications worldwide, and founded eleven companies. He has been elected to all three US National Academies — Sciences, Engineering and Medicine — and his honours include the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the 2023 King Faisal Prize in Science. He is the founding editor of the journal Small.