Munir Nayfeh
Professor Munir Hasan Nayfeh is a Palestinian-American particle physicist, renowned for his pioneering work in nanotechnology. Nayfeh was born in December 1945, in the village of Shweikeh near Tulkarem, in the West Bank. Due to the Israeli invasion, Nayfeh was forced to continue his post elementary studies in Jordan, where he received his Thanaweyeh Ammeh (high school diploma). He received his Bachelors degree in 1968, and his masters in physics in 1970 from the American University of Beirut, after which he won a scholarship to pursue his PhD at the University of Stanford in the USA, which he successfully completed in 1974.
Professor Nayfeh then went onto to work in Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1974–1977, then at Yale University in 1977, finally joining the University if Illinois as a tenured professor in 1978. He has published over 130 papers, and several books, on Lasers, Electricity and Magnetism. His name appears on the "Whos' Who America", the "Who's Who in Technology Today", and the "Who's Who in Engineering" lists.
Nayfeh is most noted for his pioneering work in nanotechnology, and in 1977 answered the question that Richard Feynman posited in 1959 "what would happen if man could manipulate individual atoms? and succeed in rearranging them within their chemical constituents?". Using cutting edge technology in Lasers, Nayfeh succeeded in manipulating individual atoms into the shape of a 'P' enclosed within a heart. This ground breaking work revolutionised particle physics, and has enabled the advent of electron microscopes and nanotechnology.