Elisa Riedo


Elisa Riedo is an academic in the fields of physics, nanotechnology and engineering. She is a professor at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and is also the director of the picoForce Lab.

Biography

Riedo received her Ph.D. in physics in a joint program between the University of Milano and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. She then worked at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. In 2003 she was hired as an assistant professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. From 2016 to summer 2018, she worked as a professor of nanoscience at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and a professor of physics at the City College of New York. Since 2018, she has been a professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Her research is focused on new scanning probe microscopy based methods to study and fabricate materials and solid/liquid interfaces at the nanoscale. Highlights from her research are the invention of thermochemical nanolithography, the discovery of the exotic viscoelasticity of water at the interface with a solid surface, and the development of new methods to study materials' elasticity and friction with sub-nm resolution. Applications of her work range from fundamental understanding of nanoscale matter to fabrication of the building blocks for the next generation of electronics, biomedical, sensing, and photonics devices.
In 2013, Riedo was elected an American Physical Society Fellow for her atomic force microscopy studies of nanoscale friction, liquid structure and nanotube elasticity, and the invention of thermochemical nanolithography.