David L.
Allara

David L. Allara is an American chemist based at Penn State University, where he is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley for his chemistry degree, which he obtained in 1959, before moving to the University of California, Los Angeles, where in 1964 he was awarded a PhD in chemistry.

Allara’s academic career continued through a number of research positions at the University of Oxford, Stanford University and San Francisco State University. In 1970 he joined Bell Labs, where in 1984 he was made a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. At the Labs, in collaboration with Ralph Nuzzo, he obtained fundamental results on the development of self-assembled monolayers and their characterization.

Since 1987 he has been based at Penn State University, where he has continued his research on molecular self-assembly, with particular focus on understanding their chemical and physical properties through spectroscopic techniques.

Among other honours, Professor Allara is a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, of the American Vacuum Society for Science and Technology, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also been awarded the Adamson Award for Distinguished Achievements in Surface Chemistry and an American Chemical Society Analytical Division Spectrochemical Analysis Award.