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by Gordon Ellis -
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In this series, ChEnected is introducing readers to the recipients of AIChE’s 2024 Institute and Board of Directors’ Awards. As AIChE’s highest honors, the awards’ recipients are nominated by the community and voted upon by the members of AIChE’s Awards Committee.
Presented since 1945, the Allan P. Colburn Award for Excellence in Publications by a Young Member of the Institute is given to an early-career AIChE member. The award is sponsored by DuPont.
This year, the Colburn Award is being presented to Dr. Ying Diao, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University Scholar, and Dow Chemical Company Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is being recognized “for fusing molecular assembly with surface science to reveal unconventional mechanisms of surface-induced nucleation, and creating innovative, scalable printing methods for nanomaterials manufacturing.”
Dr. Diao and the other Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients will be recognized at the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting, October 27–31 in San Diego, California.
About Ying Diao
Ying Diao began her chemical engineering studies at Tsinghua University (China). She went on to earn her PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, where her doctoral thesis sought a greater understanding of the heterogeneous nucleation of pharmaceuticals through the designing of polymeric substrates. In her subsequent postdoctoral training at Stanford University, her research turned to the field of printed electronics.
In 2015, Dr. Diao started her lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where her research group explores the assembly of organic functional materials and innovative printing approaches that enable structural control down to the molecular and nanoscale. She has documented this work in more than 110 publications, which have been cited over 10,000 times. Her research has been featured in leading scientific journals and in the news media.
At the University of Illinois, Diao also serves as Co-chair of Molecular Science and Engineering at the Beckman Institute of Advanced Science and Technology, and she is a leader of the Molecular Maker Lab Institute, an interdisciplinary NSF Institute.
She has given nearly 100 invited lectures and was named to the MIT Technology Review’s list of Innovators Under 35 for her pioneering work in nanotechnology and materials. Diao is also a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, and the Owens Corning Early Career Award from AIChE’s Materials Engineering and Sciences Division.
ChEnected will be introducing all the 2024 Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients. Visit ChEnected regularly to meet this year’s honorees in this series.