Personal Page – Professor

Osvaldo N. Oliveira Jr. is a physicist, with BSc and MSc from the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, and PhD from University of Wales, Bangor (1990). In 2019 he received the Doctor Honoris Causa degree from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. He is the director of Sao Carlos Institute of Physics, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. He published ca. 690 papers in refereed journals, which received ca. 20,700 citations (h = 65) in the Web of Science, and 31,500 citations (h = 81) in Google Scholar, in August, 2024, filed 12 patents, and supervised 53 MSc and PhD students. Prof. Oliveira has led research into the fabrication of novel materials in the form of ultrathin films obtained with the Langmuir-Blodgett and self-assembly techniques. Most of this work has been associated with fundamental properties of ultrathin films with molecular control, but technological aspects have also been addressed in specific projects. This is the case of an electronic tongue, whose response to a number of tastants is considerably more sensitive than the human gustatory system. Prof. Oliveira has helped establish the Núcleo Interinstitucional de Linguística Computacional (NILC), which is a leading institute for natural language processing of Portuguese. Research and development activities at NILC include the development of a grammar checker for Brazilian Portuguese, which was available worldwide through Microsoft Word for many years, and participation in the Universal Networking Language (UNL) Project, sponsored by the United Nations University. He published two books on outreach activities and edited a book on scientific writing. In recent years, Prof. Oliveira has pioneered the combined use of methods from distinct fields of science, with the merge of methods of statistical physics and computer science to process text, and use of information visualization to enhance the performance of sensing and biosensing. Prof. Oliveira was the president of the Brazilian Materials Research Society from 2016 - 2020, and is the President of the International Union of Materials Research Societies (IUMRS). He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and executive editor of ACS Applied Materials Interfaces. In 2006 he was awarded the Scopus Prize, given to 16 Brazilian researchers considered the most productive in terms of papers published and citations.