BioMed SA, a not-for-profit organization committed to growing and promoting San Antonio’s thriving healthcare and bioscience sector, has selected chemistry and physics professor W.E. Moerner, Ph.D. of Stanford University to receive the 10th Julio Palmaz Award for Innovation in Healthcare and the Biosciences. The award commemorates the legacy of Dr. Julio Palmaz, the creator of Palmaz^® Stent, and is given to individuals who have made notable contributions to healthcare and bioscience.

To receive the award, Dr. Moerner will be attending the company’s 10^th annual Palmaz Award dinner to be held in San Antonio on Thursday, September 10, 2015 at The Grand Hyatt Hotel. This takes place the same year BioMed SA places San Antonio as a City of Science and Health. Dr. Moerner is the first Nobel Laureate to receive the Palmaz Award, which recipients alternate between San Antonio locals and esteemed researchers and professionals from other parts of the country. Dr. Moerner is the first Palmaz Awardee who is both.

Dr. Moerner currently serves as the Harry S. Mosher Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy of Applied Physics at Stanford University in California. There he leads investigations on physical chemistry and chemical physics on a molecular and cellular level. He is also known for sharing in last year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his revolutionary work in super-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy, which has allowed the visualization of intracellular, molecular activity.

Dr. Moerner owes his nomination for the Palmaz Award to Drs. David Weiss and James Lechleiter of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, which was the first institution in the state and the second in the country to obtain a STORM microscope that operates based on principles from Dr. Moerner’s Nobel work.

“The selection of a visionary scientist such as Dr. Moerner, who was raised in San Antonio and went on to win the world’s most distinguished prize in chemistry, is a testament to what bright young minds here in our region can aspire to and achieve,” said BioMed SA Chair Kenneth P. Trevett.

“I am very happy to accept the Julio Palmaz Award,” said Dr. Moerner, “as this recognizes the lifelong efforts of me, my collaborators, and my colleagues in the field to study single molecules and to develop useful applications such as super-resolution microscopy.”