Curriculum Vitae

Andrei Kholkin has received his PhD degree from the A. F. Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia (supervisor Prof. G. A. Smolensky) for his studies of kinetic phenomena in ferroelectrics. He subsequently held research positions in Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Switzerland) and Rutgers University (USA) where he extended his experience to the development and characterization of novel ferroelectric thin films and nanostructures as well as bulk piezoelectric actuators. He is currently a research coordinator of the Center for Research in Ceramic and Composite Materials of the University of Aveiro (Portugal) where he leads a group developing multifunctional materials (ferroelectrics, multiferroics, relaxors, biopiezoelectrics and nanostructures of thereof) and scanning probe microscopy techniques. He is a co-author of about 300 technical publications in this area including 1 book and 15 book chapters. He co-edited several special issues on nanoscale electromechanics and ferroelectrics (including September 2009 issue on nanoelectromechanics in MRS Bulletin and August 2010 special issue in Journal of Applied Physics) and serves as an associate editor-in-chief for the IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control. He is a member of the Ferroelectric Committee of IEEE and was a recipient of the excellence award from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. He successfully organized several conferences on ferroelectrics and related materials and serve as a reviewer for various funding agencies in USA, Europe and Russia. He was a co-founder of the successful conference series “Piezoresponse Force Microscopy and Nanoscale Phenomena in Polar Materials” and is a member of the advisory boards of several conferences on ferroelectrics.

Nanoscale elecromechanics: from oxides to biomaterials