Professor Tour has over
800 research publications, over
130 granted patents and over
100 pending patents. He has an
h-index = 175 with
total citations about 140,000. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and he won the Rice University, School of Natural Science, Research Award for the discovery and development of flash graphene. In 2021, he
won the Oesper Award from the American Chemical Society which is
awarded to “outstanding chemists for lifetime significant accomplishments in the field of chemistry with long-lasting impact on the chemical sciences.” In 2020, he became
a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and in the same year was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize for innovations in materials chemistry with applications in medicine and nanotechnology. Based on the impact of his published work, in 2019
Tour was ranked in the top 0.004% of the 7 million scientists who have published at least 5 papers in their careers. He was
inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015. Tour was named among
“The 50 Most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by
TheBestSchools.org in 2019; listed in
“The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters
ScienceWatch.com in 2014; and
recipient of the Trotter Prize in “Information, Complexity and Inference” in 2014; and was
the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, June, 2014. Tour was named
“Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine, 2013. He was
awarded the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching, 2012, Rice University;
won the ACS Nano Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society, 2012; was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University, June, 2011 and was elected
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2009. Tour was
ranked one of the Top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade, by a Thomson Reuters citations per publication index survey, 2009;
won the Distinguished Alumni Award, Purdue University, 2009 and the Houston Technology Center’s Nanotechnology Award in 2009.
He won the Feynman Prize in Experimental Nanotechnology in 2008, the NASA Space Act Award in 2008 for his development of carbon nanotube reinforced elastomers and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society for his achievements in organic chemistry in 2007. Tour was the
recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching in 2007. He also won
the Small Times magazine’s Innovator of the Year Award in 2006, the Nanotech Briefs Nano 50 Innovator Award in 2006, the Alan Berman Research Publication Award, Department of the Navy in 2006, the Southern Chemist of the Year Award from the American Chemical Society in 2005 and
The Honda Innovation Award for Nanocars in 2005. Tour’s paper on Nanocars was
the most highly accessed journal article of all American Chemical Society articles in 2005, and it was listed by
LiveScience as
the second most influential paper in all of science in 2005. Tour has won several other national awards including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in Polymer Chemistry and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in Polymer Chemistry.
