Every year, the Herman Mark prize is awarded to three outstanding scientists in the field of polymer science, a young scholar, a mid-career scientist, and a senior scholar. This year’s mid-career scientist award is going to Rigoberto Advincula, who just moved last year to Case Western Reserve University, after a long stint at the University of Houston.
Rigoberto, or Gobet for those more familiar with him, has built his career on the study of macromolecules capable of controlled self-assembly into thin films and dispersions. His research is split between the synthetic activity necessary to construct the polymeric building blocks capable of acquiring the desired properties, and an impressive array of characterization techniques and finally applications. The polymers created in Prof. Advincula’s lab have been used in smart coatings, packaging, biomedical devices, electronics, and many other areas. A strong interest of his group in recent years has been investigating the exciting properties and applications of polymer brushes.
Gobet is, among is many other side activities, a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Polymer Science. A symposium in honor of the Herman Mark prize-winners will be held at the ACS 2013 Fall Meeting in Indianapolis.
The prize is named after legendary polymer scientist Herman Mark whom, among his many other accomplishments, is remembered for his work on X-ray diffraction of fibers, which provided early evidence for the macromolecular theory of polymer structure and, reportedly, thought Linus Pauling a thing or two about X-rays, which he put to good use in his work on proteins. Herman Mark is considered a father of the polymer science field in the United States, also because he founded, and directed for decades, the influential Journal of Polymer Science and Journal of Applied Polymer Science.