Jacob Sagiv

Jacob Sagiv was awarded the Kavli Prize in 2022 for work in nanoscience.

Jacob Sagiv is an Israeli chemist who spent most of his research career at the Weizmann Institute of Science, at Rehovot, Israel. Born in Romania, he moved to Israel as a teenager and in 1969 he obtained a degree in chemistry and physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

After his PhD in chemistry, obtained at the Weizmann Institute in 1976, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen, Germany, in the group of Hans Kuhn. It was during this period that he laid the foundation to the field of what would become known as self-assembled monolayers.

Back in Israel in 1978 he joined the Weizmann Institute as a senior scientist, and through a series of promotions he became a professor in 2004. Throughout his career he continued investigating the properties of self-assembled monolayers, including the development of layer-by-layer synthesis, the fabrication of membranes for electrochemical sensing, and several patterning techniques.

For his research, Professor Sagiv has been awarded a number of prizes, including the 2005 Prize of Excellence from the Israel Chemical Society and the 2010 Kolthoff Prize in Chemistry.