A short video featuring Professor Paul Weiss giving a tour of his office for UCLA College’s “UCLA Office Hours” series has received hundreds of thousands of views and likes on social media since its March 9 launch.
The one-minute video has, to date, received over 290k views on Facebook, 287k views on Instagram, 9,015 views on X, and 1,036 likes on TikTok.
In the video, Weiss gives a tour of his office, pointing out some of his favorite items, including an original gel from the classic cartoon “The Jetsons” and chocolate he received when he met with President Obama at the White House.
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).
The “Office Hours” video series is directed, hosted, and edited by Jacob Lawson, an architecture undergraduate student and social media content creator at UCLA Strategic Communications.
“The video series highlights UCLA professors by showcasing their visually interesting and unique office spaces,” Lawson explained. “Through brief, engaging tours, viewers get an inside look at quirky decor, interesting collections, and the personalities of UCLA’s esteemed faculty. The series reveals a different side of academia, connecting professors’ office spaces to their fields of study and personal stories.”
The original concept for the series was developed by Lawson’s supervisors at UCLA Strategic Communications, Ruben Ilan and Leandro Huerto, who coordinate the logistics and collaborate with media colleagues across UCLA departments to identify the best professors and offices to feature. They worked with Lawson to refine the concept, while he conducts the interviews and films and edits the content.
“So far, we have featured professors in Theater (Prof. Deborah Nadoolman), Law (Prof. Adam Winkler), Medicine (Prof. Lee Miller), Chemistry (Prof. Paul Weiss), Geology (Prof. Peng Ni), and Art (Dr. Silvia Forni, the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum),” Lawson said. “It has been so rewarding for me to meet esteemed individuals all over campus and the hardest part is definitely editing because these faculty have endless fascinating stories to share.”
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penjen@g.ucla.edu.
