Pulickel Madhavapanicker Ajayan, known as P. M. Ajayan, is the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering at Rice University. He is the founding chair of Rice University's Materials Science and NanoEngineering department and also holds joint appointments with the Department of Chemistry and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Prior to joining Rice, he was the Henry Burlage Professor of Material Sciences and Engineering and the director of the NYSTAR interconnect focus center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute until 2007. Known for his pioneering work of designing and carrying out the first experiments to make nanotubes intentionally. Early life and education Ajayan was born on 15 July 1962 at Kodungallur, a coastal town in Thrissur District, in the Indian state of Kerala, to Pulickal Madhava Panickar, a telephone mechanic, and Radha, a teacher at the local school. He studied in a government school in Kodungallur where the medium of instruction was Malayalam until 6th standard, after which he moved to Loyola School, Thiruvananthapuram, a high school he has credited for making a strong impact on him, and for making him "realize that learning is the most exciting thing one can ever befriend". He graduated from Loyola in 1977. In 1985, Ajayan graduated at the top of his class with a BTech degree in Metallurgical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. In 1989, he earned a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Afterwards he spent three years as a post-doc at NEC corporation, Japan, two years as a researcher at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Orsay, France, and one year at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart, Germany. Research Ajayan is a pioneer in the field of nanotechnology. His PhD work (1989) involved the characterisation of gold nanoparticles on oxide substrates and their phase instabilities. He was involved in the early development of carbon nanotubes. From 1991 onwards, at the NEC Fundamental Research Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, he worked with Sumio Iijima and Thomas Ebbesen and published some of the early works in carbon nanotubes. During the past two decades he has published more than 400 papers on various aspects of carbon nanostructures, mostly on nanotubes and recently on graphene and other layered materials such as boron nitride. Ajayan's research interests are broad, focusing on nanomaterials development for a variety of applications such as energy storage, composites, electronics and