Dr. Charles Black

Biography

I am Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for the Energy and Photon Sciences Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where I am also a Senior Scientist. I am also Director of the Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA), a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center. C2QA is a 28-institution collaboration led by Brookhaven Lab, advancing materials and modular quantum architectures to enable scalable, fault-tolerant quantum systems.
I also currently lead a five-year, major DOE project to modernize the U.S. nanoscience infrastructure by developing and installing new instrumentation across six national laboratories in the DOE complex.
From 2016–25, I was the Director of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The CFN is a national scientific user facility, operated for the DOE as a resource for the worldwide scientific community. Each year, the CFN supports the science of more than 700 researchers from around the world — from universities, industry, and national laboratories.
Prior to becoming Director, I was Group Leader for Electronic Nanomaterials in the CFN, responsible for managing the staff and setting group research directions for nanostructured electronic materials. From 1996 to 2006, I was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where my collaborators and I pioneered using polymer self-assembly for high-resolution patterning in semiconductor electronics, work that was recognized with the Technology of the Year Award from Industry Week Magazine and for which I was named Fellow of the American Physical Society.
In my 30+ year career so far, I have also at different times carried out research on: superconductivity of nanoscale materials; nanomaterials for solar devices; nanocrystal-based materials and devices; low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy; and ferroelectric nonvolatile memories.