Retired August 2025
celebration held on July 26, 2025. Courtesy: Robert Hamers
Professor Hamers received his Bachelors of Science degree from UW–Madison and earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University. After five years at IBM’s main research center in Yorktown Heights, NY, he joined the Department of Chemistry and has been a member of the faculty for nearly 35 years.
At UW, he served as principal advisor to 70 Ph.D. students and 21 postdocs, and mentored more than 75 undergraduate students and 14 high school students. Together, they co-authored nearly 400 scientific publications and secured 18 U.S. patents. He has been recognized by awards, including the Vilas Fellow, Wisconsin Distinguished Professor, and Steenbock Professor of Physical Science. In 2024, he was recognized with the Hilldale Award in the Physical Sciences in recognition of his combined research, teaching, and service to the university.
His group’s research centers on the unique physical and chemical properties of solid surfaces and their interface with vacuum and liquid environments. His early research focused on the area of scanning tunneling microscopy, where his group conducted some of the first atomic‐resolution studies of structure and chemical reactions at surfaces of semiconductors. This work led to a continuing interest in the surface chemistry of diamond and other carbon materials, where their research yielded new insights into how to manipulate diamond’s properties to enhance biocompatibility, stability, electrochemical activity, and photochemical properties. In 2012, he founded the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology (CSN) and served as Center Director through its 13‐year lifetime, linking UW-Madison with twelve other universities and government labs in a collaborative effort to understand the environmental interactions of engineered nanomaterials. Among other discoveries, their work showed that nanoparticles can serve as a highly effective way to deliver copper and other micronutrients to plants, improving plant health by stimulating the plants’ intrinsic defense mechanisms. In 2007, his interest in nanomaterials led him to entrepreneurship, and alongside Professor Robert West, he co-founded a start‐up company, Silatronix, with the goal of making safer lithium‐ion batteries. Their UW research yielded critical mechanistic information that contributed to the company’s growth to 15 employees and an acquisition in 2021.
His research accomplishments have been recognized with external awards, including an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, the AVS Medard Welch Medal, the ACS National Award in Colloid & Surface Chemistry, the ACS Arthur Adamson Award, the International Surfaces and Nanostructures Prize, and recognition with Fellow status in the AAAS, the American Chemical Society, and the AVS.
He has taught undergraduate courses aimed at the fundamentals of analytical chemistry, Chemistry 327 and 329, and created our department’s Materials Chemistry Ph.D. path to provide opportunities for students with interests spanning synthesis and characterization of condensed phases. He has also developed the graduate‐level materials chemistry class, Chemistry 652. To provide increased opportunities for undergraduates to conduct research, he co-founded the Chemistry/CBE joint REU Program in Renewable Energy and served as co-PI. The REU and the CSN’s SURE summer program have created opportunities for more than 100 non-UW undergraduates to conduct summer research at UW. In 2019, Professor Hamers co-founded the ACS/UW Bridge to the Chemistry Doctorate Program — the first in the country — and served as its co-lead.