He has served as the Founding Chair of the campus-wide Materials Science and Engineering (MS&E) Program and as a Director of the Nanofabrication Facility (NanoFab) at UCR.

[3] In this work, he proposed theoretically a new physical mechanism for reduction of thermal conductivity due to the changes in the phonon group velocity and density of states induced by spatial confinement.

[7] In order to perform the first measurement of thermal properties of graphene, Balandin invented a new optothermal experiment technique based on Raman spectroscopy.

[9][10] The Balandin optothermal technique for measuring the thermal conductivity was adopted by many laboratories worldwide, and extended, with various modifications and improvements, to a range of other 2D materials.

[16] He successfully used noise measurements as spectroscopy for better understanding of the specifics of electron transport in graphene and other low-dimensional (1D and 2D) materials.

The early work on CDW effects was performed with bulk samples, which have quasi-1D crystal structures of strongly-bound 1D atomic chains that are weakly bound together by van der Waals forces.

The synergy among different research directions is in the focus on spatial confinement-induced effects in advanced materials, phonons and strongly correlated phenomena such as charge-density waves.