Eric P. Y. Chiou — a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering — and Paul Weiss — a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and materials science and engineering — at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have been elected as fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
The academy’s fellowship honors inventors at academic institutions who have “demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.”
Chiou leads the UCLA Optofluidics Systems Laboratory, which focuses on integrated photonics, electronics, and microfluidics devices for biomedical applications.
A fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), Chiou joined UCLA Samueli in 2006 following a postdoctoral appointment at UC Berkeley. He holds more than a dozen U.S. patents. Some of his major inventions have been licensed to tech companies, including the optoelectrowetting and optoelectronic tweezers, pulse laser-activated cell sorter, biophotonics laser-assisted single-cell technology and laser-activated supercritical injector. He is also the co-founder of MET Biotechnology LLC, a spin-off from UCLA.
Weiss holds the UC Presidential Chair in Chemistry and leads an interdisciplinary research group at UCLA that focuses on atomic-scale chemical, physical, optical, mechanical and electronic properties of surfaces and supramolecular assemblies. His research has led to major advances in scanning probe microscopes and a broad range of nanofabrication processes, providing insights into biological and electronic systems.
A prolific scientist and inventor, Weiss holds more than 40 U.S. and international patents and has been an author on more than 500 publications. He is a fellow of IEEE, AIMBE, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Vacuum Society and the Materials Research Society. He joined UCLA in 2009 from Pennsylvania State University, where he was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics. He is a member of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center.
Both Chiou and Weiss also hold faculty appointments in bioengineering and they are members of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, where Weiss served as its director from 2009 to 2014.
Also joining Chiou and Weiss as a new fellow of the National Academy of Inventors is Xiangfeng Duan, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry. The UCLA trio are part of the academy’s 2023 class of 162 fellows from 35 U.S. states and 10 countries. They will be honored at the NAI’s 13th annual meeting June 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina.