About the Authors

Venkatesh Narayanamurti is Benjamin Peirce Professor of Technology and Public Policy, Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Physics, Emeritus at Harvard University.

      His career spans the summits of American research — industrial, national-laboratory, and academic. From 1968 to 1987 he was at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he became head of the Semiconductor Electronics Research Department in 1976 and served as Director of the Solid State Electronics Research Laboratory from 1981 to 1987, with primary responsibility for initiating new programs at the interface of science and technology — and where his passion for recruiting extraordinary talent became legendary. On assignment from Bell Labs, he then served as Vice President of Research (later Vice President of Research and Exploratory Technology, a title he added toward the end of his tenure to highlight the interrelationship of science and technology) at Sandia National Laboratories (1987–1992). He followed this with six years as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1992–1998), concurrently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and becoming the Richard A. Auhll Professor in his final year there.

      He came to Harvard in 1998 as dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, led its transformation into the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and stepped down in 2008 as SEAS's founding dean, having also served as the John L. Armstrong Professor and as Dean of Physical Sciences. From 2009 to 2015 he directed the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, where his efforts included co-editing, with Laura Diaz Anadon and Matthew Bunn, Transforming U.S. Energy Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

       As a physicist, he is credited with developing the field of phonon optics and has been active in semiconductor nanostructures; he is the author of more than 250 papers spanning condensed matter and applied physics and technology-innovation policy. He earned his BSc and MSc in physics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, and his PhD in physics from Cornell University (1965), and holds an honorary doctorate from Tohoku University (2009). He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering — where he served as Foreign Secretary from 2011 to 2015 — the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and the World Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the AAAS, the IEEE, and the Indian Academy of Sciences and Indian National Academy of Engineering. In 2018 he received the NAE's Arthur M. Bueche Award for seminal contributions to condensed matter physics and visionary leadership of multidisciplinary research across industry, academia, and national laboratories. He has accumulated over 16,800 Google Scholar citations, and his Google Scholar h-index is 64.

     Over the past decade, he has devoted himself to rethinking how research works and how it should be nurtured, drawing on his rare vantage across all three sectors of American research. That project has produced two books — Cycles of Invention and Discovery: Rethinking the Endless Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016, with Toluwalogo Odumosu) and The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research (Harvard University Press, 2021, with Jeffrey Y. Tsao) — along with continuing articles in Research Policy, Nature, and Nature Reviews Physics.

     His recreational loves are running, squash, and finding "shanti" by reading, catching up on research, and listening to music.

     He currently resides in New Providence, NJ.

Jeffrey Y. Tsao is an independent researcher exploring the nature and nurture of research, broadly encompassing the science, technology, history and philosophy of science and technology — subtopics including metascience, research policy, the history and philosophy of science (HPS), and AI for S&T. He retired in October 2025 as a Senior Scientist in the Material, Physical and Chemical Sciences Center at Sandia National Laboratories, after a career spent in the trenches of America's R&D enterprise.

     He holds a BS in mathematics and an MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a PhD in applied physics from Harvard University, where his advisors were Nico Bloembergen (1981 Nobel Laureate in Physics), Eli Yablonovitch (pioneer in photonic crystals and semiconductor optical physics), and Itamar Burak (laser photochemistry).

     From 1981 to 1991 he was research staff, first at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, studying laser microchemistry, then at Sandia, studying semiconductor epitaxy — leading to the research monograph Materials Fundamentals of Molecular Beam Epitaxy (Academic Press, 1994).      From 1991 to 2001 he managed semiconductor materials and device research departments at Sandia, including departments that pioneered vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and InGaN metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), with an entrepreneurial leave as VP of R&D at E2O Communications, a pre-IPO fiber-communications company, and a sabbatical at Singapore's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering.

     From 2001 through 2013 he played a "community organizer" role in national research: co-authoring the seminal 1999 white paper The Case for a National Research Program on Semiconductor Lighting; serving as general editor of the first comprehensive DOE solid-state lighting roadmap (2002); coordinating the DOE Basic Research Needs workshops on solar energy utilization (2005) and solid-state lighting (2006), whose processes helped seed the ten-workshop BRN series and, in turn, DOE's billion-dollar Energy Frontier Research Center program; and then serving as Chief Scientist of the Energy Frontier Research Center for Solid-State Lighting Science (2009–2015). Along the way he helped articulate new insights into the economics of the LED lighting revolution, including the projections known as Haitz's Law and the economic effect known as the rebound effect.

     In 2013, he turned to the nature and nurture of research: understanding the nature of research so as to better understand how to better nurture it. He was a Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center (2016–2021), and, with Venkatesh Narayanamurti, co-authored The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research (Harvard University Press, 2021). His current focus is the Bell Labs Xs vision — rebuilding, in twenty-first-century public-private form, the use-embedded, curiosity-motivated research that the great corporate laboratories of the twentieth century embodied and that America's research enterprise has largely lost — laid out in the white paper Beyond the Endless Frontier [SSRN LINK]. He has also begun exploring the connections between technoscientific discovery by human and artificial intelligences.

     Jeff is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1995), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), Optica (2017), the Illuminating Engineering Society (2024), and the IEEE (2025). His recognitions include the IES Technical Achievement Award (2014), the Asian American Engineer of the Year (2013), and the Sandia and Martin Marietta Author of the Year and Jefferson Cup Awards (1994). He has published over 175 articles, books, and book chapters — including 5 books authored, co-authored, or co-edited, and more than 140 publications each cited 10 or more times; holds 11 U.S. patents; and has given over 100 invited or plenary talks. He has accumulated over 15,000 Google Scholar citations, and his Google Scholar h-index is 52.

     In his spare time, Jeff enjoys family activities and travel, and dabbles with piano (mostly jazz) and tennis (ranked 23rd in the men's 65+ USTA Southwest region).

     He currently resides in Albuquerque, NM.