Professor Richard Kaner has been selected to receive the Qian Baojun Fiber Award (Distinguished Achievement) for his “pioneering work of conducting organic fibers especially conducting polyaniline nanofibers.”
Kaner received the international award, which includes a $10,000 prize, at the International Conference on Advanced Fibers and Polymer Materials (ICAFPM2021), October 17-20 at Donghua University (Songjiang Campus), in Shanghai, China. At his plenary lecture at the closing ceremony at the conference, Kaner discussed how he turned a basic research project on developing nanostructured conducting polymers into membranes that are now used commercially to separate oil from water.
A distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and of materials science and engineering, Kaner is among the world’s most influential and highly cited scientific researchers. Among his many awards and honors, he will be receiving the 2022 ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science, he was elected a 2020 fellow of the American Physical Society, and he was selected as the recipient of the American Institute of Chemists 2019 Chemical Pioneer Award, which honors chemists and chemical engineers who have made outstanding contributions that advance the science of chemistry or greatly impact the chemical profession. He is a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and the UCLA Institute for Carbon Management. To learn more about Kaner’s research, visit his group’s website.
Kaner and his research team have designed a series of remarkable materials. These include creating a membrane that separates oil from water and cleans up the debris left by oil fracking and scaling up a single layer of carbon known as graphene for use in energy storage devices. His research spans a wide range of topics within materials science and inorganic chemistry.
The Qian Baojun Fiber Award, established in 2017, is given out once every two years, recognizing research excellence in the field of fiber-related sciences. It consists of two separate categories: the
Distinguished Achievement Award and the Young Scholar Award.
Previous recipients of the Qian Baojun Fiber Award (Distinguished Achievement) are, in 2017, Professor Pieter J. Lemstra (Eindhoven University of Technology) and Dr. Paul Smith (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich), and in 2019, Professor Dr. Darrell H. Reneker (The University of Akron).
Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
