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Number One Honor Goes to Northwestern Chemist Chad Mirkin

Northwestern University researcher Chad Mirkin, a renowned leader in nanotechnology research and its application, is the world's top-ranked chemist spanning the last decade in terms of papers cited and published.

This is according to a recent update of the Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators that shows Mirkin as the author of 200-plus papers over the last decade. During that period, he had more than 18,000 collective citations and an average of 85 citations per paper, making him the number-one ranked author in the chemistry category in total citations and second in most citations per paper.

Mirkin is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and professor of medicine, chemical and biological engineering, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering. He also is director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern.

Two of Mirkin's earlier papers on assembling nanoparticles into materials with DNA have each been cited more than 1,500 times. Those papers are "A DNA-based Method for Rationally Assembling Nanoparticles into Macroscopic Materials," published in the journal Nature in 1996, and "Selective Colorimetric Detection of Polynucleotides Based on the Distance-dependent Optical Properties of Gold Nanoparticles," published in Science in 1997.

Mirkin, a member of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is world-renowned for his invention and development of biological and chemical diagnostic systems based upon nanomaterials. In addition, he is the inventor and chief developer of Dip-Pen Nanolithography, a groundbreaking nanoscale fabrication and analytical tool, and is the founder of three Chicago-based companies: Aurasense, Nanosphere and NanoInk.

- Megan Fellman