Shimon Weiss received his PhD from the Technion in Electrical Engineering in 1989. After a one year post doctorate at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he worked on ultrafast phenomena in semiconducting devices, he joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a staff scientist in 1990, where he continued to work on solid state spectroscopy. In 1994 he re-directed his interest to single molecule biophysics. In 2001 he joined the UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry and the Physiology departments. In 2016 he also joined the Physics department at Bar Ilan University, Israel (part time).
The Weiss lab has been working on ultrasensitive single molecule spectroscopy methods for over two decades. They were the first to introduce the single molecule FRET method and together with the Alivisatos group the first to introduced quantum dots to biological imaging. They have also developed a variety of single molecule spectroscopy methods, a variety of novel detectors for advanced imaging and spectroscopy, a superresolution imaging method dubbed SOFI, novel optical imaging tools for single cell physiology, and single inorganic nanoparticle voltage sensors for probing neural networks.
Dr. Weiss has published 180 peer-reviewed papers, and holds 32 issued and 35 published patents. He was awarded the Humboldt Research Award, the Rank Prize in opto-electronics, and the Michael and Kate Barany Biophysical Society Award. He holds the Dean Willard Chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry and he is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.