Professor Nuzzo has been named a Fellow of the World Innovation Foundation, an organization based in Britain. Among its approximately 50 US members are Paul Lauterbur, Ron Breslow, Malcolm Chisholm, John Goodenough, Bruce Merrifield, Kary Mullis, Dick Zare, and Howard Zimmerman. He has also been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Art and Sciences.
Below is an exerpt from the UIUC News Bureau article.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Frederick K. Lamb and Ralph G. Nuzzo, professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have been elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Election to the American Academy is an honor that acknowledges the best of all scholarly fields and professions. Among the academy's 196 other new fellows are Nobel Prize-winning physicist Eric Cornell, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Academy Award-winning actor and director Sidney Poitier. They will be inducted Oct. 8 during ceremonies at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
Nuzzo is a William H. and Janet G. Lycan Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory on the Illinois campus. He also is a leader in a university initiative that combines neuroscience with chemistry and materials science.
Nuzzo is a recognized leader in the chemistry of materials, including processes that occur at surfaces and interfaces. His work has lead to new techniques for fabricating and manipulating materials at the nanoscale, including functional device structures for microelectronics, optics and chemical sensing.
Nuzzo was a pioneer in the development of methods of molecular self-assembly that have led to entirely new areas of surface chemistry with important extensions into physics, biology and materials, and with numerous applications ranging from biosensors to advanced electronics. His work has made important contributions to soft lithography - a low cost alternative to conventional photolithography for patterning circuits on microchips.
Nuzzo earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1976 from Rutgers University, and his doctorate in organic chemistry in 1980 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Illinois faculty in 1991.
The American Academy was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people."
The academy has more than 4,000 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members, which includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. The academy focuses its research on international security, social policy, education and the humanities.