Professor Ying Diao has received the 2024 Owens Corning Early Career Award from the Materials Engineering & Sciences Division (MESD) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Diao was cited for “fusing molecular assembly with surface science to reveal unconventional mechanisms of surface-induced nucleation, and creating innovative, scalable printing methods for nanomaterials manufacturing.”
The Owens Corning Early Career Award is given annually in recognition of outstanding independent contributions to the scientific, technological, educational or service areas of materials science and engineering. Diao will be recognized at the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting MESD Plenary session, where she will also give an invited talk.
Diao joined the ChBE faculty at Illinois in 2015 where her research group seeks to understand assembly of organic functional materials and innovate printing approaches that enable structural control down to the molecular and nanoscale. She has received several recognitions for her work, including MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 (2016), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry (2018), a NASA Early Career Faculty Award (2020), and recognition as a University Scholar (2023).