Wilson Ho was born on February 5, 1953, in Changhwa, Taiwan where he received his primary school education. His parents believed that there were more opportunities abroad for their four children. In 1965, the family moved to Kobe, Japan and immersed in a new culture and he actively played baseball. In 1967, the family immigrated to San Francisco, California, where he attended A.P. Giannini Junior High School, followed by Lowell High School. His interests in science and mathematics led him in 1971 with scholarships to the California Institute of Technology where he majored in Chemistry and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1975. He was actively involved in sports, with track in High School, which he continued to participate at Caltech and added cross country and swimming, receiving the Most Improved Swimmer trophy in 1974. Based on the distinctions he achieved in his courses, he was elected a lifetime member of the Tau Beta Pi. He also managed to publish 11 papers from his undergraduate research under the guidance of Professor W. Henry Weinberg and was awarded the Sigma Xi Award at graduation. Surface science was a rapidly emerging field and jumping on this opportunity, he carried out graduate education and research in Physics at the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of Professors E. Ward Plummer and J. Robert Schrieffer. He was awarded with an American Vacuum Society Fellowship (1975 - 1978) and an I.B.M. Predoctoral Fellowship (1978 - 1979). He was involved in the early stages of the development of high resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) and his Ph.D. work, combining experiment and theory, discovered a new selection rule and unraveled the underlying mechanisms for this widely used technique. The importance of this work was recognized with the W. Nottingham Prize by the Physical Electronics Conference of the American Physical Society (1979), the Sigma Xi Award by the University of Pennsylvania (1980), and the Victor K. LaMer Prize by the Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (1980). Upon completion of his Ph.D. work in 1979, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff. Attracted by the natural beauty of the Ithaca campus, he became an Assistant Professor of Physics at Cornell University in 1980. He was promoted to an Associate Professor of Physics in 1985 and Professor of Physics in 1991. He was elected a member of the Materials Science Center at Cornell University in 1980. During the first five years at Cornell, his efforts lied in the development of time-resolved EELS (TREELS) for studying surface kinetics with time resolution of 5 ms. In 1983, he started a research program in surface photochemistry, which led to the development of three femtosecond laser systems. In a series of papers, his group elucidated the fundamental mechanisms and provided a basic understanding of the observed translational, internal energy, spin-orbit, and angular momentum distributions of photodesorbed molecules. He pioneered the use of supersonic molecular beams for nonequilibrium growth of thin films - supersonic jet epitaxy. His interest in instrumentation propelled him to the construction of variable, low temperature scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) in ultrahigh vacuum and a unique tunable infrared femtosecond laser. A unified understanding of the important process of electron transfer at solid surfaces was realized from studies of resonant electron scattering, femtochemistry, and STM-induced chemistry. In 1998, his group succeeded in performing inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy and microscopy on a single adsorbed molecule with single bond sensitivity. By combining manipulation and imaging with vibrational spectroscopy, it becomes possible to study molecular motions, energy transfer, intermolecular interactions, chemical transformations, and electrical conductivity at the single molecule level and achieve chemical control at the spatial limit. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1981, elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1995, awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior US Scientists in 1997, and the Bonner Chemistry Prize in 2000. Attracted by the projected growth, opportunities, and challenges at the University of California, Irvine, he joined in 2000 this relatively young, but dynamic campus and assumed the Donald Bren Professorship of Physics & Astronomy and Chemistry. At UCI, he focuses on the continuing exploration of single atoms and molecules with sub-Ångström resolution.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Nanoscience at the Atomic and Molecular Scales