Dr. Richard Claus is involved in the design and use of smart materials for advanced engineering applications. He currently works full-time at NanoSonic after leaving a chaired faculty position at Virginia Tech in 2006. During the 1970s, he was part of the first group at the NASA Langley Research Center to embed optical fiber sensors in advanced composites. In the early 1990s, he chaired the first International Conference on Smart Materials and led the sensor instrumentation effort on the DARPA Smart Wing program, a predecessor to the DARPA Morphing Aircraft effort. Since 1995, he has worked on new nanostructured versions of multifunctional materials, especially those for use as transducers in sensing systems. This work has involved the synthesis of nanoclusters and other molecules, the formation of thin-film and bulk materials from these molecules, and the investigation of structure/property relationships of the materials for transducer use.
Claus has received the ASME/AIAA Adaptive Structures Prize, the ASCE Norman Medal, the Charles Stark Draper Award, an SPIE Lifetime Achievement Award for work in smart materials and structures, and prizes from the Optical Society of America, the IEEE, and the IOP. He currently serves as editor-in-chief for the IOP journal Smart Materials and Structures, and he participates in the international Optical Fiber Sensor (OFS) conference.