FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | January 19, 2012

ACS Nano Letters co-editors A. Paul Alivisatos and Charles M. Lieber win prestigious Wolf Foundation Prize

WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2012 — A. Paul Alivisatos, Ph.D., and Charles M. Lieber, Ph.D., co-editors of the American Chemical Society (ACS) peer-reviewed journal, Nano Letters, are among eight winners of the prestigious Wolf Prize for 2012.

The Wolf Prize is awarded annually in the scientific fields of agriculture, chemistry, mathematics, medicine and physics, and in the arts, and consists of $100,000 and a certificate. Recipients are selected by an international committee. The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize.

Alivisatos is director of the U.S. Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and is the Larry and Diane Bock Professor of Nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley. In awarding Alivisatos its chemistry prize, the Wolf Foundation cited him for developing “the colloidal inorganic nanocrystal as a building block of nanoscience, making fundamental contributions to controlling the synthesis of these particles, to measuring and understanding their physical properties, and to utilizing their unique properties for applications ranging from light generation and harvesting to biological imaging."

Lieber is the Mark Hyman, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. The Wolf Foundation cited him “for developing new methods to control the shape and heterostructure of nanowires, for characterizing their physical properties, and for demonstrating their potential applications.”

Alivisatos is widely recognized for demonstrating that semiconductor nanocrystals can be grown into two-dimensional rods and other shapes as opposed to spheres. This achievement paved the way for a slew of new applications, including biomedical diagnostics, revolutionary photovoltaic cells and LED materials. He also demonstrated key applications of nanocrystals in biological imaging and renewable energy.

Lieber is a pioneer in the synthesis of a wide range of nanoscale materials, the characterization of the unique physical properties of those materials and the development of hierarchical assembly methods for nanoscale wires. Lieber has demonstrated the use of nanoscale materials in nanoelectronics, nanocomputing, biological and chemical sensing, neurobiology and nanophotonics.

Alivisatos has been an ACS member for 22 years and Lieber for 31 years.

Other winners of the 2012 award are:

Physics: Jacob D. Bekenstein, Ph.D., Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Medicine: Ronald M. Evans, Ph.D. , Gene Expression Laboratory, The Salk Institute, La Jolla, Calif.

Mathematics: Michael Aschbacher, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

Mathematics: Luis Caffarelli, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

Music: Maestro Placido Domingo of the Washington and Los Angeles Opera Houses

Music: Sir Simon Rattle, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Germany

Nano Letters, one of ACS’s 41 peer-reviewed scientific journals, reports on fundamental research in all branches of the theory and practice of nanoscience and nanotechnology. It provides rapid disclosure of the key elements of a study, publishing preliminary, experimental and theoretical results on the physical, chemical and biological phenomena, along with processes and applications of structures within the nanoscale range. Out of 64 journals in nanoscience and nanotechnology, Nano Letters ranked No. 2 in Impact Factor and No. 2 in citations, with an Impact Factor of 12.219 and 61,066 total cites, based on the 2010 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2011).

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