WARRENDALE, PA—The Materials Research Society's (MRS) Outstanding Young Investigator Award recognizes outstanding, interdisciplinary scientific work in materials research by a young scientist or engineer who shows exceptional promise as a developing leader in the materials area. This year, MRS has named two award recipients—Dino Di Carlo, University of California, Los Angeles, and Timothy J. White, US Air Force Research Laboratory. Di Carlo and White will be presented with their awards on March 31, 2016, at the 2016 MRS Spring Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.
About Dino Di Carlo
Di Carlo was cited "for pioneering methods to manufacture, measure, and manipulate microstructured materials and applying these innovations to biomedical problems." He will present his award talk, Microstructured Materials for Cell Analysis and Regeneration, on Thursday, March 31, from 5:30-6:15 p.m. in Room 102 of the Phoenix Convention Center West.
Di Carlo has pioneered using inertia in microfluidic systems to control cell, particle and fluid motion. Against the prevailing wisdom of the time, he showed that inertia is extremely useful and easily exploited in microchannel flows to fabricate particles and manipulate cells. This includes positioning randomly distributed cells into a single-file stream, spreading cells out in ordered trains, or separating cells by size or deformability. More recently, Di Carlo's research has used microfluidics and microfabrication techniques, especially inertial microfluidic techniques, to engineer novel materials for applications in wound healing, 3D advanced materials, tunable biomaterials, and shaped microfibers.
Di Carlo received his BS degree in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and PhD degree in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Francisco. He conducted postdoctoral studies at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award; US Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award; Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award; National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award; and Coulter Translational Research Award.
About Timothy J. White
White was cited "for innovations in the preparation and applications of photo-responsive materials." He will present his award talk, Programming Liquid Crystal Elastomers-Elasticity, Actuation and Beyond, on Thursday, March 31 from 6:15-7:00 p.m. in Room 102 of the Phoenix Convention Center West.
White has made many contributions to the fields of photopolymerization, optics, liquid crystals, and especially the combination of these three, where he was able to fabricate polymer actuators with unprecedented responsive properties. He has led work in understanding new materials, liquid-crystal glassy and elastomeric solids, in particular their large, fast, and reversible mechanical response to light. He leads a research program that spans several disciplines-synthetic chemistry, advanced processing (especially patterning and LC alignment), mechanics, optics, and the linkage of these fields to theoretical physics. White's work is generally focused on stimuli-responsive soft materials. A primary focus of his current research is on assimilating these disciplines to locally self-organize the orientation of liquid crystals to prepare polymeric sheets with complex director profiles imprinted within them. This is a step forward from the novel responses already shown in liquid crystalline materials with homogenous orientation in that unique topographical surface features, or foldable structures, can be prepared by localizing the mechanical response within the elastic sheets. White's research activities have initiated a shift toward the preparation of arbitrary, switchable, reversible shape development potentially useful in applications in aerospace, medical devices, optics and photonics, and microfluidics.
White earned his MS and PhD degrees in chemical and biochemical engineering from the University of Iowa. He has received the Air Force Early Career Award; American Chemical Society PMSE Division Award; and SPIE Early Career Achievement Award.
About the Materials Research Society
MRS is an organization of over 12,000 materials researchers from academia, industry and government worldwide, and a recognized leader in promoting the advancement of interdisciplinary materials research and technology to improve the quality of life. MRS members are students and professionals hailing from physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and engineering—the full spectrum of materials research. Headquartered in Warrendale, Pennsylvania (USA), MRS membership now spans 90 countries, with approximately 45 percent of members residing outside the United States.
MRS serves and engages members across generations to advance their careers and promote materials research and innovation. The Society produces high-quality meetings and publications, assuring that members of all career stages can present and publish their most important and timely work to an international and interdisciplinary audience. MRS continues to expand its professional development portfolio, as well as promote diversity and inclusion in the scientific workforce, with career services for researchers worldwide. The Society advocates for the importance of scientific research and innovation to policymakers and the community. And the MRS Awards program honors those whose work has already had a major impact in the field, as well as those whose work shows great promise for future leadership.
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