Daniel Morse
Institute Role
Member of Production & Storage Solutions Group
Role in Affiliated Centers
Member of the Center for Energy Efficient Materials
Research
Daniel Morse conducts research at the intersection of biotechnology and
nanotechnology in a new interdisciplinary collaboration that combines the
approaches of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology with Materials Engineering,
Physics, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He and his laboratory are
discovering the molecular mechanisms governing biomineralization, and are using
these mechanisms to develop new strategies for the synthesis of
high-performance, nanostructured composite materials for tomorrow's advanced
optoelectronics, microelectronics, catalysts, sensors and energy transducers.
Together with colleagues at the Center for Energy Efficient Materials, Morse is
working on bio-inspired solar products and high-power batteries by improving
our understanding and control of heterogeneous materials that are engineered or
templated at the nanoscale. These developments offer tremendous opportunities
for future improvements in the performance and cost of photovoltaics and energy
storage.
Biography
Daniel Morse received his B.A. degree in Biochemistry from Harvard in
1963, and his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Albert Einstein College of
Medicine in 1967. He conducted postdoctoral studies in Molecular Genetics at
Stanford University. Morse was appointed the Silas Arnold Houghton Associate
Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Harvard Medical School
before joining the faculty of UC Santa Barbara. At UCSB, he was the founding Director
of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (in which capacity her
served for six years) and the Marine Biotechnology Center. Morse has been
awarded a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and a
Faculty Research Award from the American Cancer Society. He has been honored as
a Distinguished Faculty Scholar by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, as
a Visiting Professor of Bio-Nano-Electronics at Toyo University in Japan and as
a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Paris and the National University of
Singapore. Mores has also been elected a Regents Fellow of the Smithsonian
Institution and elected a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. His students have received
international recognition and awards in numerous symposia and international
research meetings.
