UCLA and UC Berkeley, each with two professors selected, were the only universities in the country to have more than one professor honored by Scientific American. Gary W. Small, the Parlow-Solomon Professor on Aging at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was also selected.

Heath was selected in manufacturing -- along with his colleagues at HP Labs, R. Stanley Williams, Philip Kuekes and Yong Chen -- for inventing "self-assembling nanotechnology devices that might eventually surpass those etched into chips," Scientific American wrote.

The "Scientific American 50" appears Nov. 18 in the magazine's December issue. The list of the "visionaries" is on the magazine's Web site at www.sciam.com.

"Through their many accomplishments in 20012002, they have demonstrated clear, progressive views of what our technological future could be, as well as the leadership, knowledge and expertise essential to realizing those visions," the magazine states.

Heath and his colleagues at UCLA and HP Labs have reported significant progress toward the creation of molecular computers that could be much cheaper, smaller and more energy-efficient than today's silicon-based computers.

"This molecular approach could have failed early on in many places, and it's not failing," Heath, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute created by UCLA and UC Santa Barbara, said recently. "We're getting there. Overall, the progress is faster than any of us expected."

Molecular-based computers "have the potential for being highly energy-efficient computational platforms that can be constructed
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Contact: Stuart Wolpert
stuartw@college.ucla.edu
310-206-0511
University of California - Los Angeles
18-Nov-2002