Nobel Laureate Louis E Brus earned a BA from Rice University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University He served at the US Naval Research Laboratory until 1973, when he moved to AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1996, he joined Columbia University, where he is currently the Samuel Latham Mitchill Professor Emeritus.

While at Bell Labs, he and his team were inspired by the work of Alexei Ekimov and Alexander Efros on quantum dots. Brus expanded on the idea and was the first to demonstrate colloidal quantum dots. This work has been widely recognized. The many awards and prizes received include the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics from the American Physical Society, the Chemistry of Materials Prize from the American Chemical Society, the R. W. Wood Prize from The Optical Society, the Inaugural Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the US National Academy of Sciences Prize in Chemical Sciences, the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry from ACS, the Bower Award and Prize from the Franklin Institute, and the Welch Foundation Award in Chemistry. Brus is a Fellow of APS, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences.

On 4 October 2023 Brus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Moungi G. Bawendi and Alexei I. Ekimov, “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.”