Louis Eugene Brus[1] (born August 10, 1943)[2] is an American chemist, and currently the Samuel Latham Mitchell Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University.

[4] After obtaining his Ph.D. degree in chemical physics in 1969, Brus returned to the Navy as a lieutenant and served as a scientific staff officer in collaboration with Lin Ming-chang, at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.[4] Under the recommendation of Bersohn, Brus left the Navy permanently and joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1973, where he did the work that led to the discovery of quantum dots.

At the time, he was studying organic photochemistry on cadmium sulfide particle surfaces using pump–probe Raman spectroscopy, looking for possible applications for solar-energy.

It was in 1990, that he finally met Alexey Ekimov and Alexander Efros, who had first developed the semiconductor nanocrystals in glass in 1981 under more rudimentary conditions, however their research was not available in the United States.

In 2012 he received the Franklin Institute's Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science,[20] and was selected as a Clarivate Citation laureate in Chemistry "for discovery of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots)".

[21] In 2023, Brus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Ekimov and Moungi Bawendi "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots".