Nobel Laureate After Harvard’s First Test Failure

Moungi G. Bawendi is an American-Tunisian-French Chemist and a Professor at MIT who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023. He was the son of Tunisian mathematician  Mohammed Salah Baouendi.

Nobel Laureate Bawendi failed his first chemistry class at Harvard University. He even thought of not going back to the University. He says, ‘It shows that success can be forged out of failure; failure is part of the scientific process.’

Later, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 for discovering and synthesizing quantum dots. Quantum dots are now used in LEDs, photodetectors, photoconductors, lasers, biomedical imaging, and many more. 

Bawendi has been a Professor at MIT since 1996. He was one of the most cited chemists of the decade from 2000 to 2010.