Eun Sok Kim (L) and Chongwu Zhou (R)
USC Viterbi School professors Eun Sok Kim and Chongwu Zhou have been elected National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellows, the highest professional distinction given solely to academic inventors. They’re part of a distinguished class of 162 fellows for 2023 and bring USC Viterbi’s overall total to 25. Here’s the full list.
The fellows represent 35 states, 10 countries, and 118 research universities, governmental and nonprofit research institutions from around the world, the NAI said. Among them are two Nobel Laureates, three National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, and 22 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Collectively they hold more than 4,600 U.S. patents.
Since its inception in 2012, the NAI Fellows program has grown to include 1,898 recipients who hold more than 63,000 U.S. patents and 13,000 licensed technologies. Together their work has generated more than $3 trillion in revenue and 1 million jobs.
“This new class, in conjunction with our existing Fellows, are creating innovations that are driving crucial advancements across a variety of disciplines and are stimulating the global and national economy in immeasurable ways as they move these technologies from lab to marketplace,” NAI President Paul R. Sanberg said in a statement.
The new fellows will be honored during an induction ceremony at the NAI’s 13th Annual Meeting on June 18, 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nominations for next year’s class will be accepted May 1 through July 31, 2024.
Eun Sok Kim
Eun Sok Kim is a professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Electrophysics). His contributions stem from acoustic, piezoelectric, and vibration-energy-harvesting microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). He published a textbook titled Fundamentals of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS), and has authored about 270 refereed papers. He has 19 issued U.S. patents, along with five patents pending, in the field.
Kim has secured about $20 million as the contact principal investigator (PI) in non-equipment research grants ($18 million as his portion only), and he currently leads a research group of two postdocs and seven PhD students. The group is funded by four active National Science Foundation and four active National Institutes of Health R01 grants. He’s the contact PI on all of them.
Chongwu Zhou
Chongwu Zhou is a professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Electrophysics). His NAI fellowship election is based on the research and inventions he has achieved in the general direction of nanotechnology. As examples, Zhou’s invention of transparent carbon nanotube films as electrodes for organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs) was licensed to the Universal Display Corporation. Several of his inventions related to carbon nanotube electronics were licensed to Carbonics Corporation.
Zhou continues his research on nanoelectronics, neuromorphic computing, energy storage, and biosensing. He has authored 245 journal publications with 40,795 citations and an h-index of 99, including multiple papers published in Science, Nature, and Nature subject journals.
Published on December 14th, 2023
Last updated on March 7th, 2024
