Wilson Ho Says He Wants to Help Boost
UCI to Top Level Among Universities
The University of California, Irvine, managed a coup in grabbing top physicist Wilson Ho from Cornell University and bringing him on board this fall as a Donald Bren Professor of physics, astronomy and chemistry.
But Ho thinks he made a good move of his own.
“UCI is on the verge of a tremendous second phase of growth,” said Ho. “To be part of that is an exciting thing, and the people here are fantastic to work with.”
The Taiwanese physicist is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on condensed matter physics and chemistry, commonly referred to as nanoscience.
“There’s a very strong interaction between the chemistry and physics departments here,” he said. “And that’s very attractive to me, especially because my research is very interdisciplinary.”
Nanoscience works at providing information on atoms and molecules and their interactions with each other in forming complex structures. The science is key to enabling “nanotechnology,” the creation of microscopic machines for high-tech, biomedical and chemical uses. Futurists say such devices could do everything from repairing the human body cell by cell to increasing the data storage capacity of magnetic disks.
“Those are the kinds of applications people seem most interested in,” said Ho.
Ho’s work is centered around the tunneling electron microscope he designed. It features a needle with a tip a thousand times thinner than a human hair, and enables the physicist to probe individual molecules and atoms to discover their properties and relationships.
The university enticed Ho from his 20-year Cornell posting with an endowed chair to fund his research, courtesy of Irvine Company owner Donald Bren. It is the 10th endowed chair Bren has underwritten at UCI.
Ho also liked the prospect of being closer to his family, most of whom live in California. UCI’s dean of physical sciences, Ronald Stern, also gave Ho the opportunity to help hand pick and appoint more faculty members to bolster the department’s research.
He already has contracted an Irvine nanotechnology company,Technanology, and is setting up his new lab and getting his experiments going.
“There’s a lot of high-tech industry in the area, making the university’s programs more appealing to prospective students, especially Ph.D. students the same way Stanford and Silicon Valley feed each other,” Ho said.
“It’s still not at the level of Berkeley or Stanford, but keep in mind that those universities each have over 100 years of history,” he said. “I want to help bridge that gap over the next 10 years, bringing UCI as close in quality as possible to the country’s very best universities.”
Ho believes UCI already has done well.
“UCI has only 35 years of history, but I think it’s absolutely amazing what the university has accomplished in that relatively short time span,” he said.
After receiving his doctorate in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, Ho spent one year at AT & T; Bell Laboratories before joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1980. He has authored more than 190 journal articles, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 1997, he received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists.
Ho is UCI’s first appointment in a School of Physical Sciences initiative to add five faculty members who will contribute to ongoing research on the physics and chemistry of materials. n
