Chou receives top Taiwanese prize for technological innovation
Stephen Chou, the Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering and professor of electrical engineering at Princeton, has been awarded the 2009 Outstanding Research Award by the Pan Wen Yuan Foundation.
The award is one of Taiwan’s top honors in the high-technology field and is given annually by the foundation, typically to three recipients of Chinese descent, one of which resides outside Taiwan or mainland China.
The award honors outstanding achievement in theoretical innovation, development of experimental technology, manufacturing processes or equipment to improve production.
Chou received the award during a ceremony at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on June 19. The honor included a monetary award of about $15,000.
Chou, who earned his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined the Princeton faculty in 1998. His research focuses on developing new ways of fabricating nanotechnologies and developing innovative nanodevices and advanced materials for use in electronics, optics and other technologies.
One of his innovations, called nanoimprint lithography, a pioneering method for producing some of the tiniest man-made structures, was named one of Technology Review Magazine’s top ten emerging technologies for 2003. Another technology he helped develop, which holds potential for dramatically speeding up the sequencing of human DNA, was listed in the magazine’s 2009 list of emerging technologies.
