Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry and physics at Rice University. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. She invented the first nanoparticle with tunable plasmonic resonances, which are controlled by their shape and structure, and has won numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field of nanophotonics and plasmonics. She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working for IBM. She is a Fellow of nine professional societies, including the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Halas was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for nanoscale engineering of optical resonances and lineshapes. Her current research at Rice University focuses on studying light-matter interaction in plasmonic nanoparticles for applications in chemical sensing, biomedical sciences, catalysis, and energy. Education Halas received her bachelor's degree from La Salle University in 1980. She obtained her master's degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1984 and her doctorate from Bryn Mawr in 1987. She was a graduate research fellow at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center during her doctoral studies, during which time she developed the first "dark pulse" soliton with Dieter Kroekel, Giampiero Giuliani and Daniel Grischkowsky. A "dark pulse" soliton is a standing wave that propagates through an optical fiber without spreading and which consists of a short interruption of a light pulse. She was also part of the first research efforts focusing on time-domain terahertz spectroscopy during her time at IBM. Career and research Halas was a postdoctoral research fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories before joining Rice University in 1990, where she now heads the Nanoengineering research group bearing her name. She was appointed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Chemistry in 1999, and three years later was named the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2004, she became the director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice. She has also been a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department Physics since 2006 and 2009, respectively. Plasmonic nanoshells Halas' work in the 21st