His mother was born in Omaha, his father arrived in the US from Russia at the age of four, and they married in the middle of the Great Depression. When Heeger was nine years old, his father died, aged just 45, and the family moved to Omaha, where they shared a house with Heeger’s aunt and her children.

One of his earliest childhood memories was his mother stressing the importance of a university education, something that had been denied to her. At school, Heeger did not find science particularly easy, and physics in particular was mysterious to him, but he completed high school a year early. While there, he met Ruth, who later became his wife. They have two sons, both now academics, with whom Heeger has collaborated and published articles.

In 1957, Heeger completed his BSc at the University of Nebraska. He originally intended to become an engineer (he later admitted to having no concept at that time that science could be a career), but he graduated with a dual major in Physics and Mathematics. Heeger then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, for his PhD in Physics, which was originally part-time, alongside working for Lockheed Space and Missile Division, though he transferred to the full-time degree programme, which he completed in 1961.

Heeger then joined the Physics Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained for over twenty years, becoming Professor in 1967. In 1975 he met Alan MacDiarmid, a Professor in the Chemistry Department, and later the student Hideki Shirakawa, encounters which led to their Nobel-Prize-awarded research. Polymers were always thought to be good insulators, but Heeger, MacDiarmid and Shirakawa discovered by chance that if a thin film of the polymer polyacetylene was oxidised with iodine vapour, its electrical conductivity increased by a billion times. The researchers went on to establish that polymers can be made conductive if alternating single and double bonds link their carbon atoms, and if electrons are either removed through oxidation reactions, or introduced through reduction reactions.

Heeger moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982, as much he said for the beauty of the area as the scientific opportunities. It was there that he realised the importance of producing conductive polymers on a large scale. In 1990, Heeger founded the UNIAX Corporation, since he felt that conducting polymers were commercially viable, and he now holds around 50 patents. Heeger’s numerous awards include the Oliver E Buckley Prize for Condensed Matter Physics, the Balzan Prize for the Science of New Materials, and the President’s Medal for Distinguished Achievement from UC Santa Barbara. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the Heeger Center for Advanced Materials at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea.

Further reading

Nobel Prize in Physics 2000
Alan Heeger's Nobel Lecture
Alan Heeger’s departmental web site
Wikipedia: Alan Heeger