Laurence D. Marks

Laurence Daniel Marks is an American professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University. He has contributed to the study of nanoparticles and worked in the fields of electron microscopy, diffraction, and crystallography.

Early life and education
Marks attended Trinity School of John Whitgift in Croydon; he played chess competitively for the school and won the British Chess Championship Under 21 in 1973.

Marks attended King's College at the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1976 with a B.A. in chemistry. From 1976 to 1980, he was a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. where he worked with Archibald Howie on electron microscopy and the structure of metal crystals. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge in 1980. His dissertation topic was The Structure of Small Silver Particles.

Career
From 1980 to 1983, Marks was a post-doctoral research assistant at the Cavendish Laboratory. From 1983 to 1985, he was a post-doctoral research assistant with the Department of Physics at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. He studied nanotwinning, leading toward a way to directly image the atomic scale of nano-surfaces. In March 1985, Marks joined the faculty of Northwestern University as an assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship for physics in 1987. One of his early research efforts led to the discovery of a type of nanoparticle now known as the Marks decahedron.

Marks was promoted to professor in June 1992. In 2019, he was a senior visiting scientist with the Suzhou Institute of Nano-tech and Nano-bionics (SINANO) of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS). In July 2023, Marks was selected for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program that allowed him to study triboelecticity in Australia. As of September 2023, Marks is an emeritus professor at Northwestern University.

Awards and honors
In 1989, Marks received the Burton Award from the Microscopy Society of America for achievements in the fields of microscopy and microanalysis by a scientist under 40 years of age. He received the Bertram E. Warren Award from the American Crystallographic Association in 2015 and the International Conference on the Structure of Surfaces Prize in 2017.

Marks was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001, for his "contributions to quantitative imaging and diffraction methods for determining the atomic structure of surfaces and bulk materials", and a fellow of the Microscopy Society of America in 2017.