Paul S. Weiss
2026 Sigma Xi Fellow
Statement
"I was elected to Sigma Xi as a PhD student and have been a member continuously since then. Over the years, I have had the pleasure of helping a number of our star students become members. Several of my students have benefited from Grants-in-Aid from Sigma Xi to seed off-the-wall projects that have now become major research areas. I have enjoyed reading American Scientist, and particularly Prof. Roald Hoffmann’s columns. Roald was first a family friend (I grew up in Ithaca and my father was on the faculty at Cornell) and is now a colleague in chemistry and materials. What an honor to follow in his footsteps, first with the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement two years ago, and now as a Fellow of Sigma Xi. The IFoRE meeting in Washington, DC in 2024 was a wonderful celebration of science with an amazing cohort of students. I will look forward more celebrations with future generations of students, inspired by their Sigma Xi experiences, as I am."
Biography
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 S.B. and S.M. degrees in chemistry from MIT in 1980 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1986-88 and a visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center from 1988-89. He 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, he was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he began his academic career in 1989. 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 miniatu¬rization, 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 National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991-96), the Scanning Microscopy International Presidential Scholarship (1994), the B. F. Goodrich Collegiate Inventors Award (1994), an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1995-97), the American Chemical Society (ACS) Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry (1996), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1997), a NSF Creativity Award (1997-99), the ACS Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry (2015), the ACS Southern California Section Tolman Medal (2017), the ACS Patterson-Crane Award in Chemical Information (2018), the IEEE Nanotechnology Pioneer Award (2019), and the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement (2024), among others. He was elected a fellow of the: American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000), American Physical Society (2002), American Vacuum Society (2007), ACS (2010), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2014), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2016), Canadian Academy of Engineering (2017), Materials Research Society (2019), IEEE (2021), National Academy of Inventors (2023), European Academy of Sciences (2025), Sigma Xi (2026), and an honorary fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society (2010) and Chemical Research Society of India (2020-21). He received Penn State’s University Teaching Award from the Schreyer Honors College (2004), was named a nanofabrication fellow at Penn State (2005), and won the Alpha Chi Sigma Outstanding Professor Award (2007). He was a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Department of Molecular Biotechnology (1996-97) and Kyoto University, Electronic Science & Engineering Department and Venture Business Laboratory (1998 and 2000), and a distinguished visiting professor at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Caltech (2015). He is a visiting scholar at the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science & Technology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (2015-). He held the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) Chaire d'excellence JacquesBeaulieu (2016-17) and was a Fulbright Specialist for the Czech Republic (2017-22). Weiss was a member of the U.S. National Committee to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (2000-05). He has been the technical co-chair of the Foundations of Nanoscience Meetings and thematic chair of the Spring 2009 and Fall 2018 ACS National Meetings. He was the senior editor of IEEE Electron Device Letters for molecular and organic electronics (2005-07), and was the founding editor-in-chief of ACS Nano (2007-21). At ACS Nano, he won the Association of American Publishers, Professional Scholarly Publishing PROSE Award for 2008, Best New Journal in Science, Technology, and Medicine, and ISI’s Rising Star Award a record ten times.