The Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE), a division of the American Chemical Society (ACS), presented Evan Lloyd (PhD ’21) with the Arthur K. Doolittle Award, which recognizes an outstanding talk presented during the PMSE symposium at the Fall and Spring ACS National Meetings.
Lloyd received the Doolittle Award for his presentation “Rapid, energy-efficient synthesis and recycling of degradable thermosets”at the Spring 2021 ACS meeting.
Through frontal copolymerization of an energy-dense thermoset precursor, dicyclopentadiene, and cleavable cyclic olefins, Lloyd created high-performance structural materials that efficiently deconstruct upon the application of an environmental stimulus. The work highlights the efforts of a recent collaboration between the Autonomous Materials Systems group at Illinois and Jeremiah Johnson’s group at MIT.
All oral PMSE presentations are eligible for nomination by symposium organizers on the basis of content with emphasis on originality, impact, and development of new concepts in polymeric materials. Recipients are selected by an anonymous panel of judges appointed by the PMSE Doolittle Award Committee.
The award was originally established by the Union Carbide Corporation as the Carbide Award. The name was later changed due to Arthur K. Dootlittle’s contribution to the ACS Division of PMSE, the field of polymeric materials, and financial contributions from royalties of his book, Technology of Solvents and Plasticizers.
Lloyd graduated from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in January 2021 and went on to a postdoctoral research fellowship at Duke University where he is working on new strategies to use amplified chemical responses to drive property changes in mechanical metamaterials.
More information about the award and past recipients is available on the PMSE website.