Professors Lilian Hsiao and Stefano Menegatti Received Major Career Awards

Professors Lilian Hsiao and Stefano Menegatti have received major awards honoring their research accomplishments.

Professor Hsiao received the 2021 American Chemical Society (ACS) Unilever Award. The Award recognizes the originality, creativity, and potential impact of the work of an early-career investigator in colloid or surfactant science.

Hsiao has been recognized for advancing the fields of suspension rheology and soft haptic materials, most recently through a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an American Association for the Advancement of Science 2019 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences. She is actively involved in leadership roles in technical communities, including helping to organize the ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium meeting in 2023, creating Wikipedia profiles for underrepresented soft matter scholars, and organizing citizen science activities on social media sites such as Reddit.

She will deliver a plenary lecture at the ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium in June of this year.

Professor Menegatti (Ph.D. ’13) was selected to receive the 2021 ALCOA Foundation Research Achievement Award from the College of Engineering. The Award recognizes young faculty members who have accomplished outstanding research achievements during the preceding three years.

His research group focuses on the use of peptides and peptide mimetics to develop new technologies for purifying labile, high-value therapeutics (recombinant proteins and stem cells), developing diagnostics and detecting biochemical threats, stimuli-controlled drug delivery, and studying the phase behavior of macromolecules in solution. Together with scientists and investors from Louisiana and Maryland, Prof. Menegatti has founded LigaTrap Technologies (https://www.ligatrap.com), which commercialized affinity adsorbents for biological purifications.

Prof. Menegatti has garnered more than $25M in external research funding from federal agencies (NSF, NIH, and NIST) and global biopharmaceutical companies (Merck, Genentech, MilliporeSigma, CSL Behring, Johnson & Johnson, and KBI Biopharma). Together with Prof. Ruben Carbonell and Dr. Gary Gilleskie (B.S. ’86), he leads the AIM-Bio Research Institute, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Earlier this year Prof. Menegatti was selected as a member of the 2020-2021 class of University Faculty Scholars. The Faculty Scholars Program was established in 2012 by Chancellor Randy Woodson “to recognize and reward emerging academic leaders among our faculty…”

Congratulations to Professors Hsiao and Menegatti for these awards and your research accomplishments!