Professor Thomas Mason has been named a Senior Member by National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Mason is part of the 124 of the foremost emerging academic inventors identified by NAI’s Member Institutions and welcomed to their 2024 class of Senior Members.
NAI Senior Members are active faculty, scientists, and administrators from NAI Member Institutions who have demonstrated remarkable innovation producing technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society. They also have growing success in patents, licensing, and commercialization, while educating and mentoring the next generation of inventors.
A professor of chemistry and physics, Mason joined the UCLA faculty in 2003. He leads an interdisciplinary research group that addresses important fundamental and applied questions in soft matter, biophysics, drug delivery, and statistical mechanics. Current topics being studied by Mason’s group include lithographic pre-assembly and self-assembly of systems of custom-shaped colloidal particles as molecular mimics, fabricating complex nanoemulsions via non-equilibrium routes for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes, modeling and improving passive microrheology, and passivated gel electrophoresis. Mason has over 145 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PRL, and JACS, and 17 issued US patents, 15 of which are based on research at UCLA. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Rheology, and he is a recipient of NSF’s CAREER Award.
“This year’s class of Senior Members is truly a testament to the outstanding innovation happening at NAI Member Institutions and what happens when the academic space encourages and celebrates invention and commercialization,” said Paul R. Sanberg, President of NAI. “We are proud to welcome these outstanding academic inventors to the Academy and look forward to supporting and celebrating them as they continue in their innovation journeys.”
The 2024 class of Senior Members will be celebrated at NAI’s Annual Conference taking place June 16-18th, 2023 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A full list of NAI Senior Members is available here.
About the National Academy of Inventors
The National Academy of Inventors is a member organization comprising U.S. and international universities, and governmental and non-profit research institutes, with over 4,000 individual inventor members and Fellows spanning more than 250 institutions worldwide. It was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate, and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society. The NAI has a close partnership with the USPTO and is one of three honorific organizations, along with the National Medals and National Inventors Hall of Fame, working closely with the USPTO on many discovery and innovation support initiatives. The NAI publishes the multidisciplinary journal, Technology and Innovation. www.academyofinventors.org
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
