Professor Ivar Giaever

The Tenth Hubert M. James Lecture

October 22, 1998

Professor Ivar Giaever
Rensselear Polytechnic Institute  

"An Electrical Method To Monitor Cell In Tissue Culture"

Nobel Prize Winner in 1973, member of the National Academy and recipient of numerous awards. His research areas are condensed matter and biophysics.

Ivar Giaver is internationally known for his pioneering studies in superconductivity which led to the landmark discovery of tunneling in superconductors and for which he received the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics. Since 1988 he has been the Institute Professor of Physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Dr. Giaever was born in Norway in 1928 and received the degree of Mechanical Engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1952. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1956 and received the Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1964 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute while working at General Electric. In 1970 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and used it to study biophysics at Cambridge University. He served as an adjunct professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, in 1975 and as a visiting professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. In 1988 he was Professor-at-Large at the University of Oslo. In addition to his academic duties he is also president of Applied Biophysics Inc., a small company that is developing and exploring applications of electric cell-substrate inpedance sensor (ECIS). His current interest are focused on the behavior of organic molecules at solid surfaces and the interaction of cells with surfaces.

Dr. Giaever is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the United States National Academy of Engineering, the Norwegian Academy of Science, the Swedish Academy of Engineering and is an honorary member of the Norwegian Academy of Technology.

He was awarded the very prestigious Oliver E. Buckley prize in 1965 and in 1974 received the Vladimir K. Zworykin Award from the National Academy of Engineering.