March 9, 2022
AIU will host Nobel Prize physicist, Sir Konstantin Novoselov FRS, this month as he pairs with world-renowned artist, Kate Daudy to present, ‘At the Violet Hour’. Having an award-winning physicist visit campus will provide an extraordinary experience for the students and faculty alike, giving everyone a chance to exchange conversations and ideas.
Novoselov, born in the former USSR in 1974, was educated first in Moscow then went on to earn his Ph.D. in the Netherlands. Novoselov, perhaps best known for his work in isolating graphene while at the University of Manchester, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010. Graphene is a unique crystal in the sense that it has singlehandedly usurped quite a number of superior properties: from mechanical to electronic. This suggests that its full power will only be realized in novel applications, which are designed specifically with this material in mind, rather than when it is called to substitute other materials in existing applications.
‘At the Violet Hour’ will feature the large-scale art installation, ‘The Evolution Project’, which, on a visual level, builds on Kate Daudy’s long-established “trees” series. The art embodies Daudy’s traditional collage method and materials and brings everything into a digital space. The visual DNA of her physical trees has been identified, codified, and incorporated into the new NFT artworks. Critically, the digital works retain the DNA structure from their creation, which allows for the future interbreeding of digital trees to create new “seedling” NFTs.
In addition to publishing numerous peer-reviewed publications and the Nobel Prize, Novoselov has been awarded the Nicholas Kurti Prize (2007), International Union of Pure and Applied Science Prize (2008), MIT Technology Review young innovator (2008), Europhysics Prize (2008), Bragg Lecture Prize from the Union of Crystallography (2011), the Kohn Award Lecture (2012), Leverhulme Medal from the Royal Society (2013), Onsager medal (2014), Carbon medal (2016) and Dalton medal (2016), among many others.
He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honors.