Victor K. LaMer Award

2020 Awardee

Xiao Su
University of Illinois

Xiao Su is an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his Bachelor in Applied Sciences in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2011. He then received his PhD in Chemical Engineering  from MIT in 2017, under the direction of Professor T. Alan Hatton from Chemical Engineering and Professor Timothy F. Jamison from Chemistry. His doctoral thesis was titled “Organometallic Redox-Interfaces for Selective Electrochemical Separations”.

During his dissertation work, Xiao provided key advances to the development of electrochemical interfaces for ion-selective separations, by tuning molecular interactions at redox-active interfaces. Xiao was the recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. He also received the MIT Water Innovation Prize (2016), the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) Catalyst Award (2017), and was selected for the 2016 ACS Langmuir Student Oral Presentation Award Session.

Xiao joined the faculty at the UIUC in 2019, in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. His current research focuses on the molecular engineering of interfaces for advanced separations and process intensification. His group seeks to establish molecular design principles for stimuli-responsive interfaces, and develop electrochemical approaches for the integration of reactions and separations. Areas of application include fine chemical manufacturing, critical element recovery, water purification, and environmental remediation. Since joining Illinois, Xiao has been the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2019), and the Rescorp Scialog Fellowship (2020) in Negative Emissions Science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2021 Awardee

Rose Cersonsky
EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Rose K. Cersonsky received her Bachelor of Science degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut in 2014, serving as commencement speaker and earning the School of Engineering’s Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement. She then went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Macromolecular Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2019 under Professor Sharon C. Glotzer, the John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering, where Rose’s doctoral thesis was titled “Designing Nanoparticles for Self-Assembly of Novel Materials.” She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory of Computational Science and Modeling (COSMO) at École  Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland.

In her doctoral work at the University of Michigan, Rose focused first on the role of particle shape in nanoparticle self-assembly, demonstrating the thermodynamic stability and phase transitions motivated by imperfections in nanoparticle shape and proving the non-causality of Pauling packing rules in determining self-assembled structures. Then, turning her focus to the optical applications of colloidal crystals, Rose conducted a high-throughput study of crystallographic targets for photonic crystals, re-examining long-held design principles in the colloidal community and providing new targets for synthesis. Her doctoral work was awarded the Charles G. Overberger Award for Excellence in Research (2018), the Biointerfaces Institute Student Innovator Award (2019), independent research funding from the University of Michigan through the Rackham Merit (2014-2018) and Predoctoral Fellowships (2018-2019), as well as numerous presentation awards.

In addition to research, Rose has devoted herself to scientific service, leading and coordinating multiple outreach programs at both the University of Connecticut and the University of Michigan, and publishing work focused on community engagement in educational journals. This outreach work led to the University of Michigan ACS POLY/PMSE chapter being named as Chapter of the Year in 2017, and Rose being awarded the Yee Student Leadership Award (2017), Hamilton Student Service Award (2017), and Martin Luther King Spirit Award (2018).

Since joining COSMO at EPFL, Rose has focused on applying machine learning to problems at the atomistic scale. In particular, she has made significant contributions to methods development for dimensionality reduction in chemical studies, providing new algorithms and tools for understanding the correlations between crystal structure and materials properties. In the future, she hopes to extend these techniques to problems at the colloidal length scale, with the goal that the community can accelerate simulation and gain a greater understanding of the behavioral similarities across multiple length scales.