Awards and Honors

Samulski Honored with ACS Herman F. Mark Award

Carolina Chemistry Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Applied Sciences Department, Edward T. Samulski, has been awarded the Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry award for 2017. This award is one of the highest honors bestowed by the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry and recognizes outstanding research and leadership in polymer science. In 1989, through judicious hiring and the development of curricula integrated with traditional chemistry courses, Professor Samulski established UNC’s internationally recognized polymer chemistry program, while simultaneously maintaining his top research program, spanning a range of topics based on the interplay of basic polymer physics, and inherent molecular orientational order found in liquid crystals. This past year and a half, Professor Samulski returned from retirement to lead a Task Force, creating the Department of Applied Physical Sciences, Carolina’s first new science department in forty years. He subsequently served as the Department’s first Chair. Samulski’s major advances include adapting nuclear magnetic resonance to map the stress in elastic networks, sheared polymer melts, “RheoNMR,” and the discovery of a biaxial nematic, a phase with implications for fabricating ultra-high strength polymers. He cofounded two startups, Allotropica Technologies, 2008, which makes “extreme materials for extreme conditions,” and Carbon, 2013, which pioneers a new 3D printing method based on oxygen-inhibited free radical polymerization. He served as a senior science advisor to the State De-

partment from 2005 to 2006.

Hogan Receives Gates Foundation Scholarship

Research Assistant Professor Brian Hogan, who is also the Director for Carolina Covenant and Achieve Scholars Program, was selected by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to participate in the 8th Annual ASU GSV Summit, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Through this highly competitive Scholarship Program, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are convening over one-hundred presidents, provosts, academic officers, and other institutional leaders to participate in the Summit alongside 3,500 other leaders from across the education ecosystem; all of whom care deeply about scaling innovation in education in order to improve outcomes for all students.

Pielak Alumnus Receives Hanna Gray Fellowship

A former undergraduate research, and recent Master's student in the Pielak Group, Christopher Barnes, is one of 15 recipients of a 2017 Hanna Gray Fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Christopher, who was a chemistry major and played varsity football at UNC, was both an undergraduate and a graduate student in the Pielak Lab. There, he helped design a bioreactor for in-cell NMR, for which the group was awarded a patent, and the connected papers made the cover of the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. He also used in-cell NMR to make seminal contributions to our understanding the dynamics of protein in living cells.

Each fellow will receive up to $1.4 million in funding over eight years, with mentoring and active involvement within the HHMI community. In this two-phase program, fellows will be supported from early postdoctoral training through several years of a tenure-track faculty position.

Gerardo Perez-Goncalvez Caltech WAVE Fellow

We featured Gerardo Perez-Goncalvez in our previous newsletter, congratulating him on catching the attention of Caltech’s Professor Harry B. Gray, and subsequently become a member of the Pielak Group. Well, it is time to mention Gerardo’s continued success.

We now congratulate Gerardo Perez-Goncalvez, wo continues as an undergraduate researcher in the Pielak Group, for having been accepted into Caltech’s WAVE Fellowsprogram. This program aims to foster diversity by increasing the participation of underrepresented students in science and engineering Ph.D. programs and making Caltech’s programs more visible and accessible to students not traditionally exposed to the institution.

This Fellowship will be a fantastic way for Gerardo to increase his research experience, build his academic and professional network, and help him prepare for his continued academic path. The program will pay a weekly stipend of $600 for the ten week fellowship, and will also provide funds for travel.