Harry Dorn, a professor of chemistry in the College of Science at Virginia Tech and a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, has been reappointed the Dr. A.C. Lilly Jr. Faculty Fellow in Nanoscience by Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and Executive Vice President and Provost Thanassis Rikakis.

The Dr. A.C. Lilly Jr. Faculty Fellowship in Nanoscience was established to provide support for an outstanding faculty member in the field of nanoscience.

The fellowship recognizes Lilly’s contributions to both his professional and academic research in physics and his ongoing support of Virginia Tech. The fellowship appointment is for one year.

Dorn has held the Lilly Faculty Fellowship in Nanoscience since 2010. Dorn came to Virginia Tech in 1974 as an assistant professor and rose through the ranks to full professor in 1985.

Dorn also is affiliated with the College of Science’s Nanoscience program, part of the Academy of Integrated Science.

His expertise in nanomaterials is recognized internationally. Dorn has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles, including several in Science and Nature. Dorn has averaged 400 citations per year since 2008, and he is the holder of three U.S. patents. He has been funded to pursue both the basic science of nanomaterials and their applications.

Dorn has been a principal investigator on proposals bringing in more than $6 million since 2005. 

He served on the National Science Foundation’s Working Group to Define Major Research Facilities for Nanoscale Science and Technology in 2001; the First and Second Conferences on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in 2000 and 2001; and the steering committee of INanoVA, a conference on nanotechnology in Virginia.

In 2012, Dorn joined the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute as a professor and research principal investigator. In 2013, the Dorn laboratory and collaborators discovered an endohedral metallofullerene that represents a “missing link” with low symmetry that can transform many previously characterized metallofullerenes.

Dorn received the Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Research Excellence in 2006.

To support nanoscience education, Dorn developed A Hands-On Short Course on Buckyballs, Nanotubes, and Other Nanomaterials, and created a new graduate-level interdisciplinary course on carbonaceous nanomaterials first offered in 2008.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis.

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