Beilby Medal and Prize 2009 winner

Awarded for her contributions and discoveries in the field of organic semiconductors, including the demonstration that conjugated polymers can produce high mobilities of charge carriers when self-assembled using solution deposition.

About the winner

Zhenan Bao received her PhD, from the University of Chicago in 1995 and joined the Materials Research Department of Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. She became a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2001. She joined the faculty of the Stanford Chemical Engineering Department in March of 2004. 

Professor Bao has more than 200 refereed publications and 35 US patents. She served as a member of Executive Board of Directors for the Materials Research Society and Executive Committee Member for the Polymer Materials Science and Engineering division of the American Chemical Society. She is an Associate Editor of Synthetic Metals. She was an Editor for Polymer Reviews and she serves on the international advisory board for Advanced Functional Materials, Chemistry of Materials and Materials Today. She was elected a SPIE Fellow in 2008.

She is a recipient of the IUPAC Creativity in Applied Polymer Science Prize in 2008, American Chemical Society Team Innovation Award 2001, R&D 100 Award, and R&D Magazine's Editors Choice of the "Best of the Best" new technology for 2001. She has been selected in 2002 by the American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee as one of the twelve "Outstanding Young Woman Scientist who is expected to make a substantial impact in chemistry during this century".

She is also selected by MIT Technology Review magazine in 2003 as one of the top 100 young innovators for this century. She has been selected as one of the recipients of Stanford Terman Fellow and has been appointed as the Robert Noyce Faculty Scholar and Finmeccanica Faculty Scholar.