David B. Graves, an expert in plasma chemistry, has won the 2025 Plasma Chemistry Award from the International Plasma Chemistry Society (IPCS). 

Graves, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, has been recognized for his lifetime contributions to the field of plasma chemistry. This award is the highest recognition given by the IPCS. 

Graves’s research focuses on the fundamentals and applications of non-equilibrium, low temperature gas plasma. These plasmas operate at relatively low temperature, which allows them to be used in many potential applications. Graves and his lab focus on applications related to semiconductor and quantum device nanofabrication, biomedical applications, and chemical processing. The wide range of technological applications requires developing collaborations with colleagues in associated fields, including materials science, device physics, biochemistry, medicine and agriculture.

Graves joined the Princeton faculty in 2020 after 34 years as a faculty member at the University of California-Berkeley. From 2020-2022, he was Associate Lab Director for Low Temperature Plasma-Surface Interactions at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. 

His work has been recognized by numerous awards throughout his long career. Recently, he received the the 2023 ISPlasma Prize from the International Symposium on Advances in Plasma Science, and the 2022 Plasma Materials Science Hall of Fame Prize from the Center for Low-temperature Plasma Sciences at Nagoya University.  In 2019, he was appointed 'foreign expert' at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China and in 2017 he won the Nishizawa Award of the Dry Process Symposium in Japan.

Previously, he was appointed the first Lam Research Distinguished Chair in Semiconductor Processing at Berkeley from 2011-2016 and he held a Chaire d’excellence at the Nanoscience Foundation in Grenoble, France from 2011-2014. In 2014 he received the Allis Prize for the Study of Ionized Gases from the American Physical Society, and in 2001 he won the Plasma Prize from the Plasma Science and Technology Division of the American Vacuum Society. In the 1980s, he won the Electrochemical Society Young Author Award and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Graves is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the American Vacuum Society and the International Plasma Chemistry Society. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.