James Alexander Liddle

J. Alexander Liddle is Scientific Director of the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Division.  He received his B.A. and D. Phil. degrees in Materials Science from the University of Oxford. After his appointment in 1990 as a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories, he spent the next decade there, where his primary efforts were directed towards the research, development, and eventual commercialization of a novel electron-beam lithography technology.  He then spent four years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the Center for X-ray Optics, and then as Lead Scientist of the Nanofabrication Facility in the Molecular Foundry.  

At NIST, his division works in a variety of areas, ranging from quantum nanophotonics to biology.  His personal research focus is on nanofabrication and self-assembly for nanomanufacturing.  He has published over 275 papers, in areas ranging from electron-beam lithography to DNA-controlled nanoparticle assembly and holds 19 US patents.  He is a fellow of the APS and the Washington Academy of Sciences, and a member of the AVS and MRS.  He has served on numerous advisory and program evaluation committees, including those for NSF, DOE, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation, and is a member of the program committees of several advanced patterning technology conferences.

Selected Programs/Projects

• Thermodynamic effect of DNA scaffold topology on DNA origami folds
• DNA Origami for Manufacturing Precise Nanoscale Structures
• Fluorescence lifetime measurements of water uptake in nanocomposite interphase
• Calibration and metrology methods for single-molecule, super-resolution fluorescence microscopy lifetime measurements 
• Development of an In Situ Liquid Cell for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM)

Selected Publications

• So, You Want to Have a Nanofab? Shared-Use Nanofabrication and Characterization Facilities: Cost-of-Ownership, Toolset, Utilization, and Lessons Learned, J. Alexander Liddle, Jerry Bowser, B. Robert Ilic, Vincent Luciani, J. Res. NIST, 125, 125009 (2020)
• Revealing thermodynamics of DNA origami folding via affine transformations, Jacob M. Majikes, Paul N. Patrone, Daniel Schiffels, Michael Zwolak, Anthony J. Kearsely, Samuel P. Forry, J. Alexander Liddle, Nucleic Acids Research, 48, 5268 (2020)
• Nanoscale deformation in polymers revealed by single-molecule super-resolution localization–orientation microscopy, Wang, M., Marr, J. M., Davanco, M., Gilman, J. W., and Liddle, J. A., Materials Horizons 6, 817–825 (2019).
• Aligned Carbon Nanotube Morphogenesis Predicts Physical Properties of their Polymer Nanocomposites, B. Natarajan, I. Stein, N. Lachman, N. Yamamoto, R. Sharma, J. A. Liddle, B. Wardle, Nanoscale 11, 16327 (2019)
• Molecular Precision at Micrometer Length Scales: Hierarchical Assembly of DNA-Protein Nanostructures, Daniel Schiffels, Veronika A. Szalai, J. Alexander Liddle, ACS Nano 11, 6623-6629 (2017)