Naomi J Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and founding director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University. She is the Director of the Smalley-Curl Institute.

She was a graduate research fellow at IBM Research, served as a postdoctoral associate at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and joined the Rice faculty in 1990. Halas is one of the pioneering researchers in the field of plasmonics, creating the concept of the “tunable plasmon” and inventing a family of nanoparticles with resonances spanning the visible and infrared regions of the spectrum. She is co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, a Houston-based company developing photothermal therapies for cancer and other diseases based on her nanoparticles, currently in multiple clinical trials, and is currently transferring other technologies from her laboratory.

Halas is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the American Physical Society Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids, the Willis E. Lamb Award, and the R.W. Wood Prize of Optica. She is a Fellow of Optica, APS, SPIE, IEEE, MRS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Inventors. In 2024, she was the recipient of Optica's C.E.K. Mees Medal, "For her design, fabrication, and demonstration of nanoparticles with specific optical and physical properties, the widespread application of which enables advances in fields including cancer therapy, water security, and light-driven chemistry."