Professor Daniel Nocera

Ph.D. California Institute of Technology
Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy, Harvard University

Daniel G. Nocera is the Patterson Rockwood Professor of Energy at Harvard University. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry.

He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis and he has now translated this science to produce the artificial leaf, which was named by Time Magazine as Innovation of the Year for 2011. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy.

He has been awarded the Eni Prize, IAPS Award, Burghausen Prize, Elizabeth Wood Award and the United Nation’s Science and Technology Award and from the American Chemical Society the Awards in Inorganic Chemistry, Harrison Howe and Remsen Awards, for his contributions to the development of renewable energy.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

He was named as 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine and was 11th on the New Statesman’s list on the same topic. Nocera is a frequent guest on TV and radio, he is regularly featured in print and he was in the feature length film Cool It, which premiered in the U.S. in November 2010. His 2006 PBS show was nominated for an Emmy Award, and the show was used as a pilot to launch the PBS NOVA show, ScienceNow. In 2008, he founded Sun Catalytix, a company committed to bringing personalized energy to the non-legacy world.