Michael Gordon Receives $875,000 Packard Fellowship

Michael Gordon, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, has received a prestigious Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

The award—one of the largest nongovernmental fellowships in the country—will provide Gordon with $875,000 over five years to support his research on advanced microscopy techniques for examining structures and surfaces at a minute scale. Gordon intends to develop a scanning chemical microscope for detection, identification and high-resolution imaging of biomolecules and surfaces.

The David & Lucile Packard Foundation awards fellowships annually to talented early career science and engineering faculty. This year, 17 fellows were named.

“These professors are tackling some of the critical research questions of our time, and we know they will have a big impact not just on their fields but also on the students who are fortunate enough to work with them,” said Lynn Orr, a Stanford University professor and chairman of the Packard Fellowship Advisory Panel, in announcing the 2010 fellows.

Nominations for the fellowships were invited from the presidents of 50 top U.S. universities, and then an advisory panel of distinguished scientists and engineers reviewed the 100 nominations to select this year’s fellows. Over the last 22 years, the Los Altos-based Packard Foundation has awarded 457 fellowships, totaling $288 million, to promising science and engineering professors at 52 universities.

Gordon joined UCSB’s Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in 2007. He has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and an M.S. in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as an M.S. in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. Gordon was a postdoctoral fellow at Laboratoire des Technologies de la Microélectronique in France, then a visiting scientist at the California Institute of Technology before coming to UCSB.