An Iowa State University professor has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Dan Shechtman, an ISU professor of materials science and engineering, a research scientist for the Ames Laboratory and the Philip Tobias Professor of materials science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, will receive the award for his discovery of quasicrystals.

It’s the first time in ISU’s history that one of its professors has received the prestigious international award, said Dan Krapfl, a university spokesman.

Shechtman’s 1982 discovery of crystalline materials whose atoms didn’t line up periodically like every crystal studied during 70 years of modern crystallography is regarded as a revolutionary breakthrough that changed ideas about matter and its atomic arrangement.

Shechtman was studying rapidly solidified aluminum alloys with a toolbox that included transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and neutron diffraction. The transmission electron microscopy revealed a structure that science said was impossible: a pattern that when rotated full circle repeats itself 10 times. He did follow-up experiments to confirm his findings and published his discovery in 1984. His work was widely questioned.

“For a long time it was me against the world,” he said. “I was a subject of ridicule and lectures about the basics of crystallography.

Pat Thiel, an Iowa State Distinguished Professor of Chemistry who also studies quasicrystals, said Shechtman’s discovery meant scientific definitions had to be changed and textbooks rewritten.

“What Danny did was fantastic science,” she said. “He instigated a scientific revolution.