Paul Bohn
Paul William Bohn (born 1955 in Kentucky) is an American chemist who studies molecular nanotechnology, including nanofluidics and advanced chemical imaging. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and he co-edits the Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry.
Bohn grew up in Kentucky with his mother Catherine and father Joseph Bohn and has one brother. He earned a chemistry bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1977 and a PhD in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981, focusing on the analytical chemistry of resist materials used in x-ray lithography.
After his PhD, Bohn worked at Bell Labs (1981–1983). He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983 as an assistant professor, was promoted to associate professor in 1989, and became a full professor in 1992. He served as head of the chemistry department from 1994 to 1999 and was Interim Vice Chancellor for Research in 2001–2002. He held the title Centennial Professor of the Chemical Sciences from 2003 to 2006, and then joined the University of Notre Dame as the Arthur J. Schmitt Professor.
With Xiuling Li, Bohn developed metal assisted chemical etching (MacEtch) to create high aspect-ratio nanostructures. He also helped pioneer nanopore electrode arrays for single-entity measurements and the electrochemical zero-mode waveguide, and he works on multimodal chemical imaging of microbial communities.
Bohn has held several leadership and editorial roles. He is the founding Director of the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health and the Director of the Center for Bioanalytic Metrology (an NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center). He is a founding member of the Indiana Consortium for Analytical Science and Engineering and has served as Program Chair, Chair, and Immediate Past Chair of the Analytical Division of the American Chemical Society. He previously edited Analyst and is a co-editor of the Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry.
He has received numerous awards, including the Coblentz Award (1990) for contributions to molecular spectroscopy, the Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Society Award (2004), the Bomem-Michelson Award (2005), and the Theophilus Redwood Award (2010) from the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is the only person to have received the ACS Award in Spectrochemical Analysis (1997) and the ACS Award in Electrochemistry (2017). In 2022, he received the Charles N. Reilley Award of the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, RSC, and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, and was named one of the world’s 20 Most Influential Analytical Scientists in 2019 by The Analytical Scientist. He is married to Raylene Bohn and they have two children.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 13:42 (CET).