Prize Recipient

Sanat K Kumar
Columbia University

"For fundamental experimental, simulatory, and theoretical contributions to understanding structure, assembly, and dynamics in polymer nanocomposites and thin films."

Sanat Kumar is Bykhovsky Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University, New York, NY. He has a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY. He earned his Chemical Engineering BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (’81) followed by SM (’84) and ScD (’87) degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. Subsequently, he spent one year as a post-doctoral fellow at IBMs Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA (’87-’88). His current research focuses on hybrid inorganic-organic composite materials, ranging from enunciating their fundamentals to their application is a variety of critical sustainability contexts (gas/water separations). More recent interests are in polymer upcycling. In all cases a combination of theory, experiment and simulations are employed in the solution of these problems. He is the author of 300 publications, 3 patents and an edited book, is a fellow of the American Physical Society and is the Chevron visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is an Associate Editor of Soft Matter and has had multiple leadership roles (Department Chair, APS Polymer Division Chair, and Polymer Physics Gordon conference chair among other) and has also held several other visiting professorships and editorial board membership.

Prof. Nitash Balsara, University of California–Berkeley; Prof. Peter F. Green, National Renewable Energy Laboratory and University of Michigan Prof. Samson Jenekhe, University of Washington–Seattle (past prize winner); Prof. Yueh-Lin Loo, Princeton University; Dr. Richard Vaia, Air Force Research Laboratory; Prof. Mahesh Mahanthappa, University of Minnesota (committee chair)