Antonio H. Castro Neto. Antonio Helio de Castro Neto, often referred to as the 'Godfather of Graphene,' is a Brazilian-born physicist who serves as the founder and director of the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials (previously known as the Graphene Research Centre) and as Co-Director of the Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials (IFIM) at the National University of Singapore. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work in the theory of metals, magnets, superconductors, graphene and two-dimensional materials. He is a distinguished professor in the Departments of Materials Science Engineering, and Physics and a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003. In 2011 he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Education 
In 1984, Castro Neto attended the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In Campinas, he completed his undergraduate and Master of Science degree in physics under Amir O. Caldeira. In 1991, he moved to the United States where he obtained his PhD degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Eduardo Fradkin. His PhD thesis dealt with the understanding and description of the lowest energy excitations of Fermi liquids.

Career 
After graduation in 1994, he joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics (currently, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he studied the electronic properties of nanomaterials and nanostructures under Matthew Fisher. In 1995, he moved to the University of California, Riverside as an assistant professor. In 2000, he moved to Boston University as a professor of physics.

Castro Neto published on theoretical aspects of graphene such as the effect of vacancies in the electronic properties ; the electronic properties of bilayer graphene; superconductivity; twistronics ; Coulomb blockade in graphene mesoscopic structures; atomic collapse at charge impurities; localized magnetic states; gap opening in biased bilayers; strain engineering; and impurity induced spin-orbit effect. In 2016, Thomson Reuters recognized Castro Neto as among the top 1% of researchers in physics. He was also recognized by Clarivate Analytics from 2017 to 2019. His work has been cited more than 101,602 times, and he has an h-index of 122.

In 2008, he moved to the National University of Singapore, starting the Graphene Research Centre (GRC) in 2010 with facilities for the synthesis, characterization, and device fabrication of graphene devices. In 2014, the GRC was expanded by a grant of the National Research Foundation of Singapore to explore other 2D materials beyond graphene and their heterostructures with the creation of the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials.

Castro Neto has started 4 companies in Singapore: 2D Materials; MADE Advanced Materials, Graphene Watts and UrbaX.

References 

Living people
Grainger College of Engineering alumni
20th-century Brazilian physicists
21st-century Brazilian physicists
People from Paranaguá
1964 births
Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Academic staff of the National University of Singapore
Brazilian expatriate academics in the United States
Brazilian expatriates in Singapore
State University of Campinas alumni
Boston University faculty
Brazilian expatriates in the United States
University of California, Riverside faculty