Cornelis "Cees" Dekker (born 7 April 1959 in Haren, Groningen) is a Dutch physicist, and Distinguished University Professor at the Technical University of Delft. He is known for his research on carbon nanotubes, single-molecule biophysics, and nanobiology.
Biography
Born in Haren, Groningen in 1959, Dekker studied at University of Utrecht, where he received a PhD in Experimental Physics in 1988.
In 1988 Dekker started his academic career as Assistant Professor at the University of Utrecht; in these years he also worked in the United States as Visiting Researcher at IBM Research. It was during this period that Dekker carried out research on magnetic spin systems and on noise in superconductors and semiconductors.
In 1993 he was appointed as Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology. In the mid-1990s Dekker and his team achieved success with the discovery of the electronic properties of carbon nanotubes, the first single-molecule transistor and other nanoscience.
In 1999 he was appointed to the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professorship, a chair for outstanding young scientists. In 2000, he was appointed in a regular full professorship in Molecular Biophysics at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Delft. In 2007, he was appointed as a Distinguished University Professor at Delft. From 2010 to 2012, he was the inaugurating Chair of a new Department of Bionanoscience at the Delft University. Since 2010 Dekker also acts as the Director of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft.
Dekker has been awarded a number of national and international prizes, including the 2001 Agilent Europhysics Prize, the 2012 Nanoscience Prize, and the 2003 Spinozapremie. He also was granted an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University, Belgium.
In recognition of his achievements, Dekker was elected Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics and in 2014 he was awarded Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.
Work
Dekker started his research on single carbon nanotubes in 1993 when he set up a new line of research to study electrical transport through single organic molecules between nanoelectrodes. In 1996 a breakthrough was realized with carbon nanotubes. This was achieved in a collaboration with the group of Nobel laureate Richard Smalley. STM and nanolithography techniques were used to demonstrate that these nanotubes are quantum wires at the single-molecule level, with outstanding physical properties. Many new phenomena were discovered, and he and his research group established a leading position in this field of research. Dekker and his research group discovered new physics of nanotubes as well as explored the feasibility of molecular electronics. In 1998, they were the first to build a transistor based on a single nanotube molecule.
Since 2000, Dekker has shifted the main focus of his work towards biophysics where he studies the properties of single biomolecules and cells using the tools of nanotechnology. This change of field was driven by his fascination for the remarkable functioning of biological molecular structures, as well as by the long-term perspective that many interesting discoveries can be expected in this field. Current lines of research in his biophysics group are in the areas of:
Solid state nanopores
Biophysics of chromatin maintenance
Biophysics of bacteria and bottom up biology, working towards division of synthetic cells
Research achievements
1980s
1988, first realization of a model two-dimensional spin glass and verification of its dynamics
1990s
1990, first measurement of quantum size effect in the noise of quantum point contacts 1991, demonstration of a new vortex-glass phase in high-temperature superconductors 1996, first mesoscopic charge density waves devices; and first electrical measurements on a single metal nanocluster between nanoelectrodes 1997, discovery that carbon nanotubes behave as quantum coherent molecular wires 1998, discovery that carbon nanotubes act as chirality-dependent.semiconductors or metals; and discovery of room-temperature transistors, made from a single nanotube molecule 1999, first measurement of the wavefunction of single molecular orbitals of carbon nanotubes; and discovery of kink heterojunctions of carbon nanotubes which gave decisive evidence for a new Luttinger description of interacting electrons in nanotubes