Top University to Award Prasad Its Highest Honor

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Zhejiang University (ZJU), one of China's top research universities, traditionally bestows its most prestigious award, the honorary professorship, on Nobel Laureates and its honorary doctorate on world leaders.

Past recipients include Nobel laureates in physics, such as David Gross and T.D. Lee, and Nobel laureates in economics, such as James A. Mirrlees, Robert Mundell and Robert W. Fogel. World leaders, such as Kofi Anan, secretary general of the United Nations, have been recipients as well.

This year, for the first time, ZJU is awarding the honorary professorship not to a world leader or to a Nobel laureate, but to a University at Buffalo scientist who has earned a global reputation as a leader in the fields of photonics, biophotonics and nanophotonics, as well as a champion of world-class scientific research in developing countries.

This fall, Paras N. Prasad, Ph.D., SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UB and executive director of its Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, will travel to China to receive the honorary professorship in a dedication ceremony at ZJU.

He will spend several weeks at the university as a visiting researcher.

"Zhejiang University is happy to award this honorary professorship, the highest honor given by this university, to Professor Paras Prasad in recognition of his pioneering work in photonics, nanophotonics and biophotonics, as well as for his world leadership advancing a global infrastructure in science and technology," according to an official statement released by the office of ZJU President Yunhe Pan.

Honoring Prasad is especially fitting, according to Sailing He, Ph.D., professor and director for ZJU's Center for Optical and Electromagnetic Research, because the university is the home of Chinese optics and photonics, and the top Chinese university in these fields in which Prasad has pioneered new developments.

Prasad has conducted groundbreaking research in the development of photonics and other emerging areas created by the fusion of nanotechnology (nanophotonics) and biotechnology (biophotonics), which are at the leading edges of scientific discovery worldwide.

He also has led scientific teams to develop new approaches in nanomedicine, for example, his patented nanoclinic technology for optically trackable therapies designed for specific targeted sites in the human body. Most recently, he and his colleagues developed and used customized nanoparticles to achieve gene therapy, avoiding the need to rely on potentially toxic viruses as vectors, an achievement for which he was named one of the world's top 50 scientists in 2005 by Scientific American.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, Prasad is a fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society and SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering.

With 10 patents to his credit, he also is the author of "Introduction to Biophotonics" (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) and "Nanophotonics" (John Wiley & Sons, 2004).

In addition, he has published more than 500 scientific papers and co-edited or coauthored major books in the field of photonics materials.

Prasad is the recipient of the Schoelkopf Medal and the Morley Award of the American Chemical Society, and the SUNY Excellence in the Pursuit of Knowledge Award.

He is a resident of Amherst.