Elisa Riedo
Elisa Riedo is an academic in the fields of physics, nanotechnology and engineering. She is a professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and the director of the picoForce Lab. Academic career. Professor Elisa Riedo received her B.S. in physics as Summa cum Laude from University of Milano, Italy in 1995.She received her Ph.D. in physics in a joint program between the University of Milano and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France in 2000. Her time in ESRF gave her a chance to worked through major research center in Europe such as CERN, Geneva , (Switzerland), CoreCom (Politecnico of Milan and Pirelli) (Italy), Forshungzentrum of Jülich (Germany), and TASC – INFM labs, Trieste (Italy). She then worked at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In 2003 she was hired as Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Physics, where she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2009 and to full Professor in 2015. From 2016 to summer 2018, she worked as Nanoscience Professor at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), as well as a Physics Professor at the City College of New York. Since 2018, she is  a Professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, where she is the director of the picoForce Lab. Research. Her research is focused on new scanning probe microscopy based methods to study and fabricate materials and solid/liquid interfaces at the nanoscale. Highlights from her research are the invention of thermochemical nanolithography, the discovery of the exotic viscoelasticity of water at the interface with a solid surface, and the development of new methods to study materials’ elasticity and friction with sub-nm resolution. Thermochemical nanolithography, TCNL, now called tc-SPL or t -SPL was invented in Riedo's laboratory at Georgia Tech in 2007 [32, 4]. tSPL uses a localized source of heat to activate chemical reactions at the macro-down-to the atomic scale. Use thermal AFM cantilevers with variable temperature tips to implement tSPL for a variety of applications in biology, nanomedicine, nanoelectronics, and nanophotonics. Her recent research is Ultrahard Single Layer Diamond formed from two-layer Epitaxial Graphene upon Impact. A SiC(0001) substrate coated with a 2-L epitaxial graphene film not only displays a stiffness similar to that of diamond, but it also resists perforation by a diamond  indenter at loads that can create plastic indents in bare SiC, one of the hardest materials known. This work suggests a new route to produce and pattern single-layer diamond in graphene. Applications could range from nanoelectronics to spintronics. In 2013, Riedo was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for her atomic force microscopy studies of nanoscale friction, liquid structure and nanotube elasticity, and the invention of thermochemical nanolithography.