Louis was a deep thinker, a humble and wise colleague, a generous collaborator, and a beloved mentor. Louis’ scientific journey was driven by curiosity. In addition to founding what became the field of semiconductor nanocrystals, Louis worked for many years to understand the mechanisms of field enhancement and photochemistry on metallic particles. He also made seminal contributions to the understanding of excited states in carbon nanotubes and, later, graphene, as well as other low-dimensional materials. His presentations and publications had a distinctive and recognizable style: he made deep connections between chemistry and physics and painted clear physical pictures of electron behaviour in materials, often starting with simple models and writing in a direct and accessible style. Although he was considered an experimentalist, he had a long-standing interest in theory.
Born in 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio, Louis graduated high school in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri and attended Rice University in Houston, TX on a US Navy scholarship. He received a PhD in chemical physics from Columbia University, where he studied gas phase molecular kinetics. He then served as a scientific staff officer at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, where he taught himself solid state physics from textbooks, an interest that likely seeded his later discoveries in what we now call nanoscience. In 1973, he was hired at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, which at that time employed experienced scientists who were unencumbered by funding proposals and encouraged to work on hard problems, follow their curiosity, and collaborate.
