Award Winners

Olivier Allix’ researches pertain to Simulation-Based Engineering Science. That is the discipline that provides the scientific and mathematical basis for the simulation of engineered systems and aims at proposing and developing methods and concepts to solve industrial challenges.

His main activities concern the modeling of composites: damage crash …, multiscale approaches for non-linear structural mechanics (buckling, cracks propagation …), inverse approaches modeling and the objective prediction of failure in dynamics. Current researches concern non-intrusive computational techniques in order to enrich industrial simulations with physical based models. In cooperation with Professor Wriggers from Leibniz University, he plans to work on damage mechanics in conjunction with the virtual element methods, a new discretization scheme in engineering.

Thomas Baumgartner's research program targets the fundamental design of next-generation organic, hydrocarbon-based materials for practical applications that lower humanity's anthropogenic carbon footprint. The overarching theme is the efficient and sustainable use, conversion, and/or storage of energy via tailor-made chemical synthesis. To this end, the research in Professor Baumgartner's group covers the full breadth of materials chemistry encompassing imaging, measuring, modelling, and manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale. The main application areas involve the development of novel materials potentially to be used in batteries for large-scale grid storage of solar and wind energy, as well as the design of functional materials that enable efficient light-matter interactions for sustainable energy applications, such as organic light-emitting diodes.

Professor Julian Gale obtained his first degree from the University of Oxford in Natural Sciences (Chemistry), where he continued on to study for a DPhil in the Department of Chemical Crystallography. After a postdoctoral position at the Royal Institution of Great Britain he moved to Imperial College London as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and subsequently Reader in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry. In 2003, he moved to his current location, Curtin University, as a Premier's Research Fellow and now holds the position of John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Computational Chemistry. Recently he was award an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship and made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Research interests include the development and application of computational techniques to problems in areas including materials chemistry, crystallisation, geochemistry and mineralogy.

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is the Director of the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids (CPOS) and the professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Professor Nguyen received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University. She joined the faculty of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSB in July 2004.

Recognition for her research includes the 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the 2006 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2007 Harold Plous Award, the 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, the 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows, the 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award, the 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2019 Hall of Fame - Advanced Materials, the 2019 Beaufort Visiting Scholar, St John's College, Cambridge University, the 2019 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the 2015-2019 World's Most Influential Scientific Minds; Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics. Her current research interests are doping and charge transport in organic semiconductors, bioelectronics, and device physics of organic solar cells, ratchets, transistors, and photodetectors.

Daya Reddy is a graduate of the Universities of Cape Town (UCT) and Cambridge, and holds the South African Research Chair in Computational Mechanics at UCT. Starting in 1999, he served a seven-year term as dean of the faculty of science at UCT. His research is concerned with analysis and computation in continuum mechanics, motivated largely by applications in materials science and biomechanics.

Daya Reddy was a founder member in 2003 of AIMS, the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a pan-African network with centres for graduate education, research and outreach in six African countries. He is actively involved in bodies that are engaged at the science-policy interface and is currently President of the International Science Council.

His various awards include the Order of Mapungubwe, presented by the President of South Africa for distinguished contributions to science, and of the Georg Forster Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.

Andrew Weiner is the Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. His research focuses on broadband photonic signal processing, with relevance to ultrafast optics, fiber optics, ultrabroadband radio-frequency photonics, nonlinear integrated optics, and quantum photonics. He is especially well known for his pioneering work on programmable generation of arbitrary ultrashort pulse waveforms, which has found application both in fiber optic networks and in ultrafast optical science laboratories around the world. His most recent work emphasizes (a) high repetition rate frequency comb technologies (both electro-optic combs and microresonator Kerr combs) and (b) multi-frequency and time-frequency quantum optics, including integrated photonics quantum sources. Weiner is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Inventors, served for six years as Editor-in-chief of Optics Express, and is author of the graduate level textbook Ultrafast Optics.