Professor Wiesner receives NSF Creativity Award

Uli Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering in Materials Science and Engineering, has been recognized with a Special Creativity Award by the National Science Foundation (NSF). This will provide him with a two-year extension of his existing NSF single investigator award.

The NSF special creativity award is in recognition of his excellent research, productivity, and impact in the area of new polymer-based porous nanostructures from non-equilibrium processes, as well as the broader impacts emanating from his NSF project.  As stated in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG), "the objective of such extensions is to offer the most creative investigators an extended opportunity to attack adventurous, 'high-risk' opportunities in the same general research area, but not necessarily covered by the original/current proposal.”

The additional support will allow Professor Wiesner to study an entirely novel class of ultrafiltration membranes. These membranes will have profound impacts on a variety of areas, including biopharmaceutical separations.  For example, such membranes may eventually enable to perform multiple separation processes simultaneously, with a single membrane, similar to what is observed in nature, e.g. in human skin or cell membranes.

We invite you to learn more through these recent publications: 

Y. Hibi, S. A. Hesse, F. Yu, R. P. Thedford, U. Wiesner, Structural Evolution of Ternary Amphiphilic Block Copolymer Solvent Systems for Phase Inversion Membrane Formation, Macromolecules 53 (2020), 4889–4900https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.macromol.0c00595

S. A. Hesse, K. E. Fritz, P. A. Beaucage, R. P. Thedford, F. Yu, F. J. DiSalvo, J. Suntivitch, U. Wiesner, Materials Combining Asymmetric Pore Structures with Well-Defined Mesoporosity for Energy Storage and ConversionACS Nano 14, (2020), 16897-16906; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.0c05903

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