Professor Ivar Giaever
Professor Ivar Giaever is an Institute Professor Emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY. He has a degree in mechanical engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, Norway and a Ph.D. in theoretical Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He worked as a staff member at General Electric Research Laboratory for 30 years before becoming an Institute professor at RPI in 1988.
His early work in superconductors and quantum mechanical tunnelling led to a share of the Nobel Prize in 1973. Later he turned his interests to biophysics, where he first worked in immunology and developed a simple antibody test. More recently he became interested in tissue culture and together with Dr. C.R. Keese developed a method, referred to as ECIS, to study cells in tissue culture using electric fields. He is presently CEO of a small company, Applied BioPhysics, Inc., that is commercialising this method.