Dr. Ruilan Guo is the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where she joined the department in 2012. Her research focuses on the development of functional polymer membrane materials for a wide range of applications including membranes for gas separations, polyelectrolyte membranes for fuel cells, ion-containing polymers for desalination and water treatment. Dr. Guo earned her B.E. and M.E. degrees in Materials Science & Engineering from Beijing University of Chemical Technology (Beijing, China), and completed her Ph.D. at Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA, USA). She was a postdoctoral fellow working with the late Professor James E. McGrath at Virginia Tech before joining Notre Dame. Dr. Guo is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Early CAREER Award (2013), ACS Petroleum Research Fund for Doctoral New Investigators (2015), Inaugural Class of Influential Researchers by I&EC Research (2017), MSDE Emerging Investigators (2020), and CISTAR Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award (2022). She is the co-Deputy Director and Thrust Lead of a NSF Engineering Research Center – CISTAR, and serves as Editor of the journal Polymer (Elsevier) and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of ACS Applied Energy Materials (2019-2022), Frontiers in Environmental Science (2021-present) and Industrial Chemistry & Materials (2022-present).