Charles Fadley, a distinguished professor of physics at UC Davis, has been elected into the Royal Society of Sciences at Uppsala. Founded in 1710, this prestigious Swedish institution has counted as members some of the world’s most renowned scientists, including Anders Celsius, Carl von Linnaeus, Johann Gauss, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Leon Foucault, and the Swedish father and son Nobel laureates in physics, Manne and Kai Siegbahn.

Fadley is widely regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of photoelectron spectroscopy, a technique used for studying the composition and electronic state of a material using X-ray beams to excite electrons and a spectrometer to measure their energies.

In recent years he has been a leader in the development of methods for studying very thin “nanolayers” of materials buried below surfaces, work that is integral to the development of next-generation computers and other applications in nanotechnology.