Dr. Hansma
is a Research Professor, California NanoSystems Institute, CNSI, and Professor
Emeritus, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, where
he was a professor for 39 years. Dr. Hansma has been building scientific
instruments since high school where he built an air liquefier, which did not
work, and a van de Graff generator, which did. He earned his PhD in Physics at
UC Berkeley, where he built instruments for low temperature physics. At UC
Santa Barbara he invented on the first Scanning Tunneling Microscope and the
first Atomic Force Microscope that could image samples in water. Dr. Hansma
received the 2000 Biological Physics Prize of the American Physical Society for
his work on imaging biological samples. He has over 350 scientific publications
and over 25 patents. In 2001 Dr. Hansma began focusing his basic research on
nanoscale mechanisms of fracture resistance in biomaterials. Since 2005 Paul
has focused on further developing his Reference Point Indentation invention for
measuring tissue material properties clinically.