Thermoelectric Skutterudites (ePub)

Ctirad Uher is a C. Wilbur Peters Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He earned his BSc in physics with the University Medal from the University of New South Wales

in Sydney, Australia. He carried out his graduate studies at the same institution under Professor H.

J. Goldsmid on the topic of 'Thermomagnetic effects in bismuth and its dilute alloys', and received

his PhD in 1975. Subsequently, Professor Uher was awarded the prestigious Queen Elizabeth

II Research Fellowship, which he spent at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research

Organization (CSIRO), National Measurement Laboratory (NML), in Sydney. He then accepted a

postdoctoral position at Michigan State University, where he worked with Profs. W. P. Pratt, P. A.

Schroeder, and J. Bass on transport properties at ultra-low temperatures.

Professor Uher started his academic career in 1980 as an assistant professor of Physics at the

University of Michigan. He progressed through the ranks and became full professor in 1989. That

same year the University of New South Wales awarded him the title of DSc for his work on transport

properties of semimetals. At the University of Michigan, he served as an associate chair of

the Department of Physics and subsequently as an associate dean for research at the College of

Literature, Sciences and Arts. In 1994, he was appointed as chair of physics, the post he held for the

next 10 years.

Professor Uher has had more than 45 years of research, described in more than 520 refereed

publications in the areas of transport properties of solids, superconductivity, diluted magnetic semiconductors,

and thermoelectricity. In the field of thermoelectricity, to which he returned during

the past 25 years, he worked on the development of skutterudites, half-Heusler alloys,