Andre Geim

By Erik J. Larson, PhD

Sir Andre Geim was born in Sochi, Russia in 1958. He attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology where he earned an MS-equivalent degree studying solid-state physics. He then received his PhD-equivalent degree from the Institute of Solid State Physics in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Geim is currently a Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.

Geim once remarked that he wished to escape the bonds of Soviet science, and found a home studying Physics in the west. While an Associate Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, he worked on core issues in superconductivity. Geim was appointed Director of the Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nanotechnology in 2002. He became one of the Royal Society Research Professors at Manchester after 2010. He has made several important discoveries in his career as a Physicist, including the discovery of a simple method for isolating layers of graphite known as graphene. He also developed a kind of adhesive known as gecko tape, named after the gecko lizard’s feet, which use a similar method of adhesion. The hope for gecko tape is a kind of Spider Man scenario, where we can scale walls someday with the help of the technology. In 1997 he proved the phenomenon of diamagnetic levitation, where an object can be suspended in the air with nothing but a magnetic field. This led to the famous demonstration of levitating a frog, a feat which led to Geim receiving the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with colleague Michael Berry. Geim was also awarded the Copley Medal in 2013, the Carbon Medal in 2016, and the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in 2018.

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