Professor Charles E. Sing has been selected to receive the 2025 Owens Corning Early Career Award from the Materials Engineering and Sciences Division (MESD) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). This prestigious award recognizes outstanding independent contributions to the scientific, technological, educational or service areas of materials science and engineering.
Sing was cited for “theoretical advances and computational modeling to control the properties of polymers by understanding polyelectrolyte phase behavior, polymer dynamics, and transport in polymer materials.” He will be recognized at the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting MESD Plenary session, where he will also deliver an invited talk.
Sing’s research focuses on the physics of charged macromolecules, polymer architecture, polymer solutions, and networks. His research group integrates statistical mechanical theory and coarse-grained models to understand a wide range of polymer physical phenomena, including the molecular and sequence properties of polyelectrolyte solutions, the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of semidilute polymer solutions, the structure and assembly of polymers with nonlinear architectures, and charge and penetrant transport in polymers solutions and networks.
Among his honors, Sing was awarded the John H. Dillon Medal from the American Physical Society (2024), National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2017), School of Chemical Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award (2017-2018) and appeared on the American Institute of Chemical Engineering’s 35 Under 35 list (2020). He has been on the ChBE Illinois faculty since 2014, where he is the James M. and Karen S. Morris Faculty Scholar and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies.
This is the second year in a row in which a ChBE professor has been selected as winner of the Owens Corning Early Career Award. Ying Diao received the award in 2024.