Professor Gerard Wong Elected Fellow of APS

Professor Gerard Wong was recently elected to be a Fellow of the American Physical Society. The American Physical Society, whose membership is dedicated to advancing the field of physics, is the second largest of its kind in the world, and is behind such publications as Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. Out of 48,000 members throughout the world, only 0.5% are elected to be Fellows of the society. Professor Wong is the first person from UCLA's Department of Bionengineering to be elected an APS Fellow, and the only APS Fellow to be elected from UCLA this year.

Professor Wong currently acts as principal investigator for the Wong Research Group, whose interdisciplinary research combines biology, biomedicine, chemistry, engineering, and physics. Professor Wong and his group are currently working to develop new antimicrobials and to understand bacterial communities. Professor Wong and his team are currently affiliated with the California NanoSystems Institute, the NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for Directed Assembly of Nanostructures, and the NSF Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems.

He received his Bachelor's degree from the California Institute of Technology, and his PhD from the University of California in Berkeley. Since starting his faculty position, Wong has received a Beckman Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, two Xerox Foundation Research Awards, and a Racheff Scholar Award. Wong was also previously selected to the Frontiers of Engineering Symposium sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering, and represented the U.S. in the NSF-MEXT US-Japan Young Scientist Symposium on Nanobiotechnology, the Taipei Academica Sinica International Workshop on Soft Matter and Biophysics, and the NSF-DST US-India Nanoscience & Engineering Workshop.