Venky Venkatesan is the Director at NUS Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Initiative (NUSNNI) and a Professor in the Departments of ECE, Physics and MSE at the National University of Singapore. He wore various hats at Bell labs and Bellcore before becoming a Professor at the University of Maryland. As the inventor of the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process, he has more than 750 papers and 30 patents and is globally among the top one hundred physicists (ranked at 66 in 2000) in terms of his citations (over 43,000 with a Hirsch Index of 106-Google Scholar).