UR researcher on short list for Nobel winners
Get those Nobel Prize office pools fired up.
University of Rochester faculty member Ching W. Tang and a former Eastman Kodak Co. colleague have been named to a short list of likely Nobel winners for their work inventing the organic light-emitting diode.
Thomson Reuters' Intellectual Property & Science business annually puts out a Citations Laureates, which digs through scientific research citations to find the most influential scientists in such fields as medicine, economics and physics. Since 2002, the Citations Laureates list has forecast 35 Nobel winners.
Tang and Steven Van Slyke, who today is chief technology officer at California OLED printing start-up firm Kateeva, jointly wrote a paper on their invention in 1987. They did their pioneering work while working at Kodak. And Kodak's EasyShare LS633 digital camera, with an OLED screen, was the first consumer gadget incorporating OLED. The two were jointly inducted into the 2013 Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame. And today, OLEDs are widely found in everything from television sets and computer monitors to mobile phones.
Tang left Kodak in 2006 and today is professor of chemical engineering at UR, as well as Bank of East Asia Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Van Slyke left Kodak in 2010.
The two are not the only chemists in the running for the Nobel, according to Thomson Reuters. Also on its Citations Laureates list are researchers who pioneered work in such areas as the design of functional mesopourous materials and "development of the reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerization process."
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is scheduled to be announced Oct. 8.
MDANEMAN@DemocratandChronicle.com