National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) colleagues of Dan Shechtman, Ph.D., joined others in the scientific community in congratulating him on winning the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Shechtman made his astonishing discovery of a quasicrystal—an arrangement of atoms thought to be forbidden by nature—while working as a guest researcher at NIST (then known as the National Bureau of Standards) in 1982.

Shechtman is currently a professor at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion).

“We are thrilled that Shechtman’s pioneering work has been recognized with this well-deserved prize,” says NIST director Patrick Gallagher. “This discovery completely changed the thinking of scientists about unusual arrangements of atoms within crystals and ultimately helped them to fabricate a wide range of new types of materials.”

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