The 2024 Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Scientist Award, presented at MACRO 2024, has been awarded to Lutz Nuhn and Rongrong Hu.
The Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Scientist Award (formerly Samsung-Total Petrochemicals – IUPAC Young Scientists Award) is dedicated to outstanding young scientists (not older than 40 years) and is sponsored by a grant from the aforementioned company. The prize was first awarded on the occasion of MACRO 2004 (Paris) and is granted biennially on the occasion of the IUPAC World Polymer Congress. The awardees are selected from the nominees by a Committee of the IUPAC Polymer Division. The 2024 award was presented at the Macro2024 in Warwick UK to two awardees (ex aequo) namely, Professor Dr. Lutz Nuhn and Professor Rongrong Hu.
Professor Dr. Lutz Nuhn was honored with this award for his research on innovative synthetic strategies for multi-responsive and biodegradable polymeric nanocarriers and their versatile biomedical applications, particularly in the realm of advanced immunotherapies. Professor Nuhn holds the Chair of Macromolecular Chemistry and serves as the Deputy Chair of Chemical Technologies for Materials Syntheses at the Institute of Functional Materials and Biofabrication within the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany. In collaboration with Professor Jürgen Groll, he is instrumental in establishing the new “Center of Polymers for Life” in Würzburg, which is set to open next year. This center aims to further propel cutting-edge research in polymer science and its applications in life sciences.
ORCID 0000-0003-0761-1106
Professor Rongrong Hu was honored with this award for her work in establishing new polymerization reactions, exploring innovative polymer structures, and developing advanced polymer materials. Her research group has pioneered over 30 types of multicomponent polymerizations and reported more than 200 novel polymer structures. Notably, her recent development of elemental sulfur-based multicomponent polymerizations enables the efficient direct conversion of sulfur into a wide array of sulfur-containing functional polymer materials, offering promising solutions for sulfur utilization. Professor Hu is a full professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at South China University of Technology.
ORCID 0000-0002-7939-6962
> Announcement published in the Oct 2024 issue of Chemistry International (eTOC) or doi)
Former awardees include Qian Chen and Eric Appel (2022), Athina Anastasaki and Changle Chen (2020), Andreas Walther (2018), and to Moon Jeong Park and Brent Sumerlin (2016).