Fulbright Specialist Grant

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Weiss Paul UCLA

Professor Paul S Weiss awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant, allowing him to visit the Czech Republic to provide his expertise in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

“I am honored and humbled to be awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant. We have hosted a number of extraordinary Fulbright Scholars in our laboratory and these awards have led to lasting scientific ties and friendships that I hope this visit will catalyze. We have had terrific collaborations with and visits from scientists at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Now, we will hope to broaden and to strengthen those connections,” said Weiss.

Weiss is being hosted by Prof. Tomáš Baše of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, who has previously been a sabbatical visitor to the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. While in the Czech Republic, Weiss will give seminars and have one-on-one meetings with faculty and students at chemistry and physics departments at five universities and at a new nano center in Brno. He will then participate in, lecture, and give a tutorial at the 16th IUVSTA International Summer School on Physics at Nanoscale.

Weiss holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry & biochemistry and of materials science & engineering at UCLA. He received his S.B. and S.M. degrees in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.  He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Labo-ratories and a visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center. Weiss served as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute and held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA from 2009-14. 

Before coming to UCLA, Weiss was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at Pennsylvania State University, where he began his academic career in 1989. His interdisciplinary research group includes chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, mathematicians, 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, and electronic properties of surfaces, interfaces, and supramolecular assemblies. 

Weiss has been awarded a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the BF Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a NSF Creativity Award, the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry, the 2017 Jacques Beaulieu Excellence Research Chair, and the 2017 Richard C. Tolman Award, among others. He was elected a fellow of: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Vacuum Society, the ACS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and an honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society. He has been a visiting professor at Caltech, Harvard, the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Kyoto University, and the University of Washington. He is the founding and current editor-in-chief of ACS Nano. At ACS Nano, he and his team won the Association of American Publishers, Professional Scholarly Publishing PROSE Award, Best New Journal in Science, Technology, and Medicine, and ISI’s Rising Star Award a record ten times.

To learn more about Weiss’ research, visit his website