Grant Willson

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Carlton Grant Willson , called Grant Willson (born March 30, 1939 in Vallejo , California ) is an American chemist .

Willson studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley , with a bachelor's degree in 1962 and from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), with a master's degree in organic chemistry in 1969. Between 1962 and 1964 he worked as an industrial chemist at Aerojet Gen Corp. in Sacramento and taught at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in 1965/66 . In 1973 he received his PhD from Berkeley. In 1974 he became an assistant professor at Long Beach State University ; from 1976 to 1978 he was at UCSD. From 1978 to 1993 he conducted research at IBM , where he headed polymer research and technology at the Almaden Research Center in San José . Since 1993 he has been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin .

He developed chemical materials for the semiconductor industry, for example for liquid crystals, nonlinear optics and photoresistive materials in lithography. In the early 1980s he achieved a breakthrough (with Jean Fréchet , Hiroshi Ito (IBM)) in the development of photoresist polymers that enabled the production of semiconductor chips with structures below 250 nanometers using lithography.

In 1985 he became an IBM Fellow . In 1988 he received a Humboldt Research Award, the Arthur Doolittle Award and the Carothers Award from ACS, and in 2005 their Heroes of Chemistry Award. In 1999 he received the National Academy of Sciences Award for Chemistry in Service to Society . He holds over 25 patents and has published over 300 articles (2012).

Willson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation and in 2013 the Japan Prize for Fréchet . For 2018 he was awarded the ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry and for 2020 the Charles Stark Draper Prize .

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Willson, Grant
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Willson, Carlton Grant (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Vallejo , California