Nan Li wins Graduate Student Awards from ACS, MRS and AICHE

Nan Li, PhD student at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering from Prof. Yingling’s group, received three major graduate student research awards for her work on understanding and predicting the stimulus-responsive behavior of soft materials. Specifically, Nan’s research focus on utilizing and developing computational tools to understand: (1) the solvent-induced response of polyelectrolyte materials.and (2) the temperature-induced response of biomaterials based on elastin-like polypeptides (ELP). The results of her study may facilitate the design of novel soft materials in a number of promising applications such as drug and gene delivery systems, tissue engineering, biosensors, oil and water clean-up and recovery, and numerous nanoscale devices.

This week she was awarded the ACS Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award for Graduate Students at the 249th American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting in Denver, CO, March 2015. Nan received a $1,150 grant and the Yingling Group received a one-year license to the CCG’s Molecular Operating Environment Modeling Software.

Nan has also won a 2014 Silver Graduate Student Award from the Materials Research Society (Boston, MA, December 2014), and the Second Place Biomaterials Graduate Student Award at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting (Atlanta, GA, November 2014).

Nan Li