Herman F. Mark Professor
Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
Physics
Mechanical Engineering (Affiliated)
Director of Faculty Development
NYU – Tandon School of Engineering
Professor Elisa Riedo received her Ph.D. in Physics in a joint program between the University of Milano and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. After three years spent at the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) working in the field of nanoscience, in 2003 she was hired as Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) in the School of Physics, where she was promoted to full Professor in 2015. Since 2018, she is a Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, where she is director of the picoForce Lab. She is also Director of Faculty Development at NYU Engineering since 2021.
Her research is focused on new scanning probe microscopy – based methods to study and fabricate materials and solid/liquid interfaces at the nanoscale. Highlights from her research are the discovery of the exotic viscoelasticity of nano-confined water, the invention of thermochemical scanning probe lithography (tSPL) for the fabrication of high performing nanoelectronics devices based on 2D materials, including TMDC and graphene; and the first observation of the exceptional mechanical properties of diamene, pressure induced single layer diamond, obtained from graphene. Applications of her work range from fundamental understanding of nanoscale matter to fabrication of the building blocks for next generation of electronics, biomedical, sensing, and photonics devices. Dr. Riedo was elected American Physical Society Fellow for her atomic force microscopy studies of nanoscale friction, liquid structure and nanotube elasticity, and the invention of thermochemical nanolithography. In 2023, she has been elected member of the Academia Europaea.
In 2023, she has also been honored with the Endowed Chair Herman F. Mark Professorship in Chemical Engineering and the NYU Tandon Excellence in Research Award.
