The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded May 14 Peidong Yang, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, the 2007 Alan T. Waterman award, an annual $500,000 prize, a tyhree-year grant and a medal.
Yang, 36, was born and raised in the Chinese city of Suzhou, leaving to study chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei in 1988. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1997, worked briefly at UC Santa Barbara as a post-doctoral fellow, and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1999.
Yang, a member of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Materials Sciences Division, is a nanotechnology pioneer who has driven research into nanowires - flexible strips one-thousandth the width of a human hair that show promise for a range of high-technology devices.
The annual Waterman Award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by NSF. Candidates may not be more than 35 years old when nominated, or seven years beyond receiving a doctorate, and must stand out for their individual achievements.
Yang has published widely and received such awards as the NSF Young Investigator Award, the Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Materials Research Society's Young Investigator Award, the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics and the American Chemical Society's Pure Chemistry Award.(Source: Robert Sanders, UCBerkeleyNews, May 15, 2007)