A store in small-town Iowa
Alan Jay Heeger was born on a bitterly cold morning, twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, on January 22, 1936, in Sioux City, Iowa. His father’s car would not start that day, so he walked to the hospital to see his wife and new son and got frostbitten ears on the way. The Heeger family had come to Sioux City from Russia as Jewish immigrants in 1904, when his father was four years old; his mother, born in Omaha, Nebraska, was the daughter of Jewish immigrants. They married in the middle of the Great Depression.
Alan spent his early years in Akron, Iowa, a farming town of about a thousand people, where his father managed and later owned the general store. When Alan was nine, his father died of heart disease, on his own 45th birthday and on the same day as President Franklin Roosevelt. His mother moved Alan and his younger brother, Gerald, to Omaha to be near her family, and raised them as a single parent in a house shared with her sister’s family.
A mother’s lost scholarship
One of Heeger’s earliest memories is of his mother telling him how important a university education was. She had won a scholarship after high school but went to work instead, because her parents needed her income. Nobody on either side of the family had studied beyond high school, and Alan grew up certain it was his responsibility to go to university. He and his brother became the first in the family to earn doctorates.
He was a good student but remembers physics in high school as somewhat mysterious. Impatient to get on with life, he finished school a year early. In high school he also met Ruth, who became his wife and, as he wrote decades later, remains his best friend. At the University of Nebraska he began in engineering, switched after one semester, and graduated in 1957 with a double major in physics and mathematics, inspired by a modern physics course taught by Theodore Jorgensen.
Learning to do physics
Heeger started graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, while working part time for Lockheed in Palo Alto, driving the freeway three days a week and, he admitted, falling asleep at the wheel on almost every trip home. He and Ruth soon moved into student housing so he could study full time. He hoped to become a theorist under Charles Kittel, but Kittel told him frankly that he did not think he would be a first-rate theorist and advised him to work with an experimentalist who stayed close to theory. Heeger later called it perhaps the best advice anyone ever gave him. He joined the group of Alan Portis, who taught him how to think about physics and how to choose good problems, and earned his doctorate in 1961. He likes to recall his first day in Portis’s laboratory: after a single day of measurements, he wrote a whole theory and presented it proudly to his supervisor, only to return a few days later to apologise that it was nonsense. Portis was patient both times.
He then joined the physics department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he stayed for more than twenty years, studying the physics of electrons in metals and, from 1970, unusual crystals in which electricity flows along one direction only. At Penn he learned the physics of many interacting electrons from the future Nobel laureate Robert Schrieffer. From 1970 to 1975, with the chemist Anthony Garito, he studied a crystal called TTF-TCNQ that conducts electricity along stacks of molecules, work he remembered as a time of controversy and stress but one that convinced him that organic materials could behave like metals.
Plastic that conducts electricity
Everyone knows that plastic is an insulator; that is why it coats electric wires. In 1975 Heeger became intrigued by a strange polymer containing sulphur and nitrogen that behaved like a metal, and he went to see Alan MacDiarmid, a chemist at Penn, to propose a collaboration. The first meeting went nowhere until Heeger realised that while he was saying “SN,” for sulphur nitride, MacDiarmid was hearing “Sn,” the symbol for tin, which every chemist knows is a metal. Once past the misunderstanding, the physicist and the chemist began meeting on Saturday mornings simply to learn from each other.
On a visit to Japan, MacDiarmid met Hideki Shirakawa, who had made shiny silver films of a simple plastic, polyacetylene. The two Alans brought Shirakawa to Penn as a visiting scientist. In 1977 the three showed that when polyacetylene was treated, or doped, with iodine, its electrical conductivity rose by a factor of millions, turning the plastic from an insulator into something close to a metal. Heeger and his Penn colleagues then helped explain why, describing how charges travel along the polymer chains as moving defects called solitons. The discovery founded a new field: organic electronics, in which carbon-based plastics do the work once reserved for metals and silicon.
From the laboratory to the screen in your hand
In 1982 Heeger moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where with the chemist Fred Wudl he founded the Institute for Polymers and Organic Solids, now the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids. With the polymer scientist Paul Smith he learned how to make conducting polymers that could be dissolved and processed like ordinary plastics, which made them practical. In 1990 Heeger and Smith founded the company UNIAX to develop products, including light-emitting displays made from polymers; DuPont acquired it in 2000. In 1992 his group showed that light-emitting diodes could be made flexible by building them from soluble plastics. Heeger had met the chemist Yong Cao on a trip to China in 1986, brought him to Santa Barbara, and made him UNIAX’s first employee; Heeger credited Cao’s creativity and determination for much of the company’s scientific success.
In the same year, a young researcher in Heeger’s laboratory, Serdar Sariciftci, discovered that light could make electrons leap extremely fast from a semiconducting polymer to the football-shaped carbon molecule C60. That finding, and the blended plastic designs that followed from Heeger’s and Wudl’s groups, became the basis for polymer solar cells and light detectors that can be printed onto flexible sheets. Heeger later co-founded Konarka Technologies to make thin, flexible plastic solar cells. In 1996 his group, along with teams in Cambridge and Utah, also showed that semiconducting polymers could be made to produce laser light, opening yet another direction for research.
Today conducting and semiconducting polymers are used in antistatic coatings, as layers inside many OLED displays in phones and televisions, in printed sensors and biosensors, and in flexible and wearable electronics, while printable plastic solar cells continue to improve. When UC Santa Barbara marked his 90th birthday in 2026, its dean of sciences told him that he had launched the entire field of organic electronics.
The Nobel Prize
In October 2000 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for the discovery and development of conductive polymers. The Academy noted that the discovery had forced people to change their view that plastic can only be an insulator. Heeger, a physicist, thus received a Nobel Prize in chemistry, a fitting result for a career built on crossing the boundary between the two sciences. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2001.
Jewish roots
Heeger’s family story is a classic one of Jewish immigration to the American heartland. His father’s family arrived from Russia in 1904 and made their living as storekeepers serving Midwestern farmers; his mother was the first American-born generation of her Jewish family. The loss of his father, the sacrifice of a mother who had given up her own scholarship, and the conviction that education was the way forward shaped his life. He is counted among the Jewish Nobel laureates in chemistry.
Family and later years
Heeger has written that he and Ruth have shared both the exciting days and the disappointments of a scientist’s life, and that she has filled his life with love and beauty and put up with his eccentricities. Their two sons became academics: Peter Heeger, a physician and immunology researcher, and David Heeger, a neuroscientist who studies human vision. Heeger has published research papers with both of them and has four grandchildren; of all the congratulations he received for the Nobel Prize, he said, their pride gave him the greatest pleasure.
He remains a professor of materials and of physics at UC Santa Barbara. In February 2026 colleagues, former students, friends and family gathered on campus for a symposium in honour of his 90th birthday, with his sons among the speakers.
Legacy
Heeger helped turn plastic from the thing that keeps electricity in its place into a material that carries it, glows with it and makes it from sunlight. That idea now runs through the displays people look at every day and through research on cheap, flexible solar panels and electronics that can be printed like newspapers. He has always credited his students, postdoctoral researchers and collaborators, and he built one of the world’s leading centres for organic electronics, which continues to train scientists in the field he helped begin.
Sources & further reading
Alan Heeger, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Popular information: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2000, NobelPrize.org · UCSB chemistry Nobel laureate Alan Heeger celebrates his 90th birthday with a symposium, UC Santa Barbara · Alan J. Heeger, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.