UCI chemist wins prestigious Faraday Medal

The Orange County Register

January 27th, 2009

By Gary Robbins

Chemist Reginald Penner.
Image courtesy of UCI.

A UC Irvine chemist who is considered a master at assembling devices out of metal fibers 100 times thinner than a human hair has been named winner of the 2009 Faraday Medal for electrochemists, which is given by the Royal Society of Chemistry in London.

Reginald Penner was chosen for the award for contributions to a field that’s beginning to build minute bio-sensors that are meant to do such things as detect the presence of cancer in samples of urine. These nano-scale sensors also are expected to be widely used in environmental monitoring and in analyzing gases in fuel cells.

“I am thrilled to be honored by this award, and especially to win it a year after my postdoctoral mentor Nate Lewis of Caltech, who is a close friend and one of the brightest scientists I know,” said Penner, 48.