Apparao Rao

Apparao Rao is currently the R. A. Bowen Professor of Physics and a former Associate Dean for Discovery in the College of Science. He is a Fellow of four prestigious societies: the American Physical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science, National Academy of Inventors, and the Materials Research Society. He received his PhD in physics from University of Kentucky in 1989 and subsequently served as a post-doctoral research associate at MIT until 1991. Later, he joined University of Kentucky as a research assistant professor before coming to Clemson in 2000. His laboratory is dedicated to understanding the atomic, magnetic, electrical, optical, and biophysical/biochemical properties of micro- and nano-structured materials. Rao’s research interests include the characterization and applications of carbon nanotubes, semiconducting nanobelts, nanowires and thermoelectric materials. His group's strength lies in the ability to synthesize several nano-structured materials (using various growth techniques such as electrical arc, chemical vapor deposition and pulsed laser vaporization) and explore the fundamental physics in nanostructured systems (using a wide range of characterization techniques such as Raman scattering, infrared, UV-visible, fluorescence, non-linear optical spectroscopy, harmonic detection of resonance method, atomic force microscopy, electron microscopy and electrical transport measurements). Recently, his team has been developing energy harnessing and energy storage technologies, and he has served as the principle investigator on grants funded by NSF, NASA, SC EPSCoR and industry.