Bio

Paul S. Weiss, UCLA, “For pioneering contributions in adding the chemical dimension to nanolithography by controlling surface functionality from the submolecular to the macroscopic scales and developing the enabling technologies that have resulted”

Paul S. Weiss holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry & biochemistry, bioengineering, and materials science & engineering at UCLA. He received his SB and SM degrees in chemistry from MIT and his PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories and a visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center. He previously served as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute and held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA. Before coming to UCLA, he was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he began his academic career. He is a visiting scholar at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His interdisciplinary research group includes chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, mathematicians, bioengineers, electrical and mechanical engineers, computer scientists, clinicians, and physician scientists. They focus on the ultimate limits of miniatu­rization, exploring the atomic-scale chemical, physical, optical, mechanical, electronic, thermal, and spin properties of surfaces, interfaces, supramolecular, and biomolecular assemblies. They develop new techniques to expand the applicability and chemical specificity of scanning probe microscopies. They apply these and other tools to study self- and directed assembly, and molecular and nanoscale devices. They advance nanofabrication down to ever smaller scales and greater chemical specificity to operate and to test functional molecular assemblies, and to connect to the chemical and biological worlds in neuroscience, gene editing, cancer immunotherapy, tissue engineering, cellular agriculture, and the microbiome. He has authored over 500 publications, holds over 40 patents, and has given over 1000 invited, plenary, keynote, and named lectures. He is involved in startups from his and other laboratories in biotechnology, food security, energy, entertainment, and healthcare.

Weiss has been awarded a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, Sloan Foundation Fellowship, ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education, Guggenheim Fellowship, ACS Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry, ACS Southern California Section Tolman Medal, ACS Patterson-Crane Award in Chemical Information, IEEE Nanotechnology Pioneer Award, and Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, among others. He is an elected fellow of the: AVS, AAAS, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ACS, AIMBE, APS, Canadian Academy of Engineering, and European Academy of Sciences, MRS, IEEE, and National Academy of Inventors. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the leading nanoscience journal ACS Nano.