Pi-Tai Chou earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry and Biochemistry from The Florida State University, postdoctoral fellow in University of California at Berkeley, and is currently a chair professor of chemistry department and director of center for emerging material and advanced devices in National Taiwan University. His major training is in organic/inorganic photophysics and photochemistry with prime contribution on the hydrogen-bond (H-bond) interaction and its associated excited-state intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT) reaction He pioneered the study of ESIPT/H-bond correlation and made far-reaching impact for the first ESIPT laser, single-ESIPT molecule based white-light organic light emitting diode as well as invented the unnatural ortho-Green Fluorescence Protein core chromophore that undergoes ESIPT for intense green-to-NIR emission. He is also world recognized for pioneer work on the fundamental of excited-state proton coupled electron transfer (PCET). His seminal work on the femtosecond PCET dynamics unveiled the distinction between PCET and sole proton or electron transfer. He also formulized empirical theories on the spin-orbit coupling in enhancing intersystem crossing, providing the first-principle guideline for the synthetic and material chemists.
Prof. Chou has received many prestigious prizes, including Taiwan Outstanding Research Awards, Academic Achievement Award, National Chair Award, International Asian and Oceanian Photochemistry Association (APA) Award (Japan) and TWAS (The World Academy Sciences) Chemistry Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). He has published 500 SCI papers, 15 review articles, 6 book chapters and is named in 18 patents or disclosures. His Web of Science total citations are > 21,000 with an h-index of 75. He served as editorial the advisory board member of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces (2011-2014), Journal of Physical Chemistry A, B C and Letters (2014-2017) and the associate editor of Material Express (2012-2014). He is currently serving as an associate editor of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces (2014-).