Professor Paul S. Weiss has been selected to receive the 2026 Medard W. Welch Award, the top research award from the American Vacuum Society (AVS), and postdoctoral alumnus, Professor Naihao Chiang (University of Houston), has been selected for the prestigious AVS 2026 Peter Mark Memorial Award.
Weiss was selected to receive the Medard W. Welch Award “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”.
Chiang, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Houston, was selected for the Peter Mark Memorial Award for “the contributions to tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and its extension scanning ion-conductance microscopy”. This award recognizes outstanding theoretical or experimental work by an early career scientist or engineer.
Weiss and Chiang will receive the awards and give lectures at the AVS 68th International Symposium and Exhibition, slated for November 8-13, 2026, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Read more about the awards here.
Weiss holds a UC Presidential Chair at UCLA, and is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, bioengineering, and materials science and engineering. 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 served as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute and held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA. Weiss is involved in startups from his and other labs in biotechnology, food security, energy, entertainment, and healthcare, and leads the Challenge Initiative at UCLA. He served as the founding editor-in-chief of ACS Nano (2007-2021).
Chiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Houston. He received his B.S. degrees in Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics/Economics from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Northwestern University. Following his PhD, he completed his postdoctoral training at the University of California, Los Angeles, with Weiss.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
