Andre Geim

Professor Sir Andre Geim is one of the most original and irreverent scientific minds of our era — a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who turned a Friday night experiment involving sticky tape and a pencil into a discovery that launched a new age of materials science. Regius Professor of Physics and Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Manchester, and Chair Professor at the University of Hong Kong, Geim has spent his career doing what most scientists avoid: abandoning productive fields to chase entirely new problems, no matter how unconventional the starting point.

Born in Sochi, Russia, in 1958, Geim completed his PhD at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences before pursuing postdoctoral research across Europe, holding positions in Nottingham, Bath, Copenhagen, and Nijmegen before joining Manchester in 2001. His career has been defined by a deliberate pursuit of what he calls “a new patch of grass” — areas of science where no established research community has yet planted a flag. This philosophy produced a string of pioneering results: the first demonstration of diamagnetic levitation of living organisms, the invention of gecko tape (a dry adhesive inspired by the climbing mechanism of geckos, later licensed by DuPont and BAe), and research into confined monolayer water and proton transport through atomically thin membranes.

The Discovery of Graphene and the 2010 Nobel Prize

The capstone of Geim’s career came in 2004, when he and Konstantin Novoselov used ordinary adhesive tape to repeatedly peel thin layers from a block of graphite until they isolated a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon — graphene. What followed changed physics and materials science permanently. Graphene is simultaneously the thinnest material ever produced, one of the strongest substances known, an outstanding electrical and thermal conductor, and nearly transparent. Geim’s team went on to pioneer the entire field of two-dimensional crystals, showing that atomically thin layers of many materials could be isolated and stacked into precisely engineered van der Waals heterostructures — bespoke atomic-scale architectures with tailored electronic, optical, and mechanical properties. His work forms the scientific foundation of the National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester, the world’s leading centre for graphene and two-dimensional materials research. Two of Geim’s papers rank among the 100 most cited scientific publications in history. For this body of work, science speaker Andre Geim was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Novoselov. He is also the only individual in history to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize — the latter in 2000 for levitating a frog — a distinction he holds in the Guinness World Records and wears with characteristic pride.

His recognition spans the Copley Medal (the Royal Society’s highest honor), the John Carty Prize from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Körber European Science Award, the EPS Europhysics Prize, and knighthoods from both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. He is an elected member of the national academies of the U.S., UK, and China, among others. His recent research, published in Nature in 2025, achieved a hundredfold reduction in disorder in graphene devices — the cleanest graphene ever produced — opening new frontiers in quantum transport physics.

As a speaker, Professor Sir Andre Geim is in a category of his own: a Nobel Laureate whose talks are as unconventional as his science. He speaks with candor and wit about the creative process behind paradigm-shifting discovery, the value of intellectual risk-taking, and why the most transformative breakthroughs often come from outside established disciplines. Senior audiences leave with a sharper understanding of what genuine innovation requires — and why the organizations best positioned to lead the future are those that still make room for curiosity-driven exploration.