LLNL’s Aleksandr Noy named 2025 Materials Research Society fellow

Aleksandr Noy, a senior research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), has been named a 2025 fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS). The fellowship recognizes sustained contributions and dedication to the advancement of materials research and is a lifetime recognition of distinction in the field.

The committee recognized Noy for his “seminal contributions to research in nanofluidics and transport under extreme confinement, single molecule force spectroscopy, bionanoelectronics, and for leadership in the bioinspired materials community through mentorship, society organization and lecturing.”

Noy said he was surprised and humbled to receive the award.

“As a scientist, especially an experimental scientist, you never do the work alone,” he said. “This award is a recognition of the effort of many students, postdocs and colleagues who contributed to these research projects.”

Noy has worked in nanofluidics at LLNL for over 20 years, starting as a Lawrence postdoctoral fellow and advancing to a senior research scientist.

In his early career, a number of new materials began to appear, including carbon nanotubes — very long and thin straws of carbon atoms.

“People were asking questions about whether it was actually possible to push water through these tubes,” said Noy. “We did one of the first experiments that showed it's possible, and we discovered fast water and gas transport.”

Carbon nanotubes, and the movement of ions through them, are relevant to molecular separations. Water desalination, oil refining processes, pharmaceutical manufacturing and critical materials production all rely on molecular separations, but most use polymer membranes that were invented about 50 years ago and are not optimally efficient. And some applications, like separating rare earth elements for industry and defense, are even more challenging.

By changing the width of their channels, carbon nanotubes can separate ions by size. But Noy’s work goes beyond simple size separation: it aims to exploit the whole suite of processes in the nanotubes.

“The idea is that we combine size separations with ways to manage interactions of an ion with a channel wall and use that to increase the efficiency of separations,” he said. “Better membrane performance leads to simpler separations and significant energy savings. If your membrane is faster, you can also get by with a plant that is smaller. That saves you capital expenses.”

Much of Noy’s work has been inspired by biology, the ultimate separation machine.

“If you look at biological channels like those in the human kidney, it is perhaps the most efficient separation system you can imagine,” he said. “It’s basically the size of a fist and it can clean your blood and maintain it multiple times a day while using very low energy.”

His team has mimicked biological channels by embedding short carbon nanotube scaffolds in lipid membranes. This approach creates a simple but powerful model to capture the key characteristics of biological transport. Noy and his team are also pursuing nanofluidics for ionic computing, a method that uses nanotubes and other nanochannels to recreate synapse-like structures.

Noy has published over 120 peer-reviewed research papers with more than 20,000 citations and has 10 U.S. and international patents. He obtained his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard University and B.A. in chemistry and physics from Moscow State University.