Prize Recipient

Zhen-Gang Wang
California Institute of Technology

"For contributions to the theories of polymer physics in regard to nucleation, block polymer self-assembly, and polyelectrolytes, in particular, for the application of these theories to experimentally-motivated phenomena."

Zhen-Gang Wang is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor and Executive Officer of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. from Peking University (1982), and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1987), both in chemistry. Wang’s research is the theoretical and computational study of structure, phase behavior, interfacial properties, and dynamics of polymers and soft matter. His earlier work focused on elucidating the nature of anisotropic fluctuation in microphase separated AB block copolymers, the sequence dependence of ABC triblock copolymer morphologies, and nucleation behavior in polymeric systems. His more recent interest involves charged systems, including polyelectrolytes, salt-doped polymers and liquid mixtures, and ionic liquids, with a focus on elucidating the effects of ion solvation and electrostatic correlation on the thermodynamics and dynamics of these systems. Wang is a recipient of the Henry and Camille Dreyfus New Faculty Award (1991), the Camille Dreyfus Teacher–Scholar Award (1995), the Alfred P. Sloan Award (1996), and the AIChE Braskem Award (2018) and the AIChE Alpha Chi Sigma Award (2023). In addition, he was awarded the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Caltech (2008). He is a Fellow of American Physical Society. Wang has served on the editorial advisory boards of several scientific journals and is currently an associate editor for the ACS Journal Macromolecules.