Keynote Speakers

Prof. Trisha Andrew | University of Massachusetts Amherst

Professor Trisha L. Andrew is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She directs the Wearable Electronics Lab, a multi-disciplinary research team that creates electronic devices  on unconventional substrates using reactive vapor deposition, a technique that allows unmatched flexibility in device architectures, array configurations, and product assembly.  

Trisha started her career as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after receiving her Ph.D. from MIT in 2011. She has unconventional training in the disparate fields of synthetic organic chemistry and microelectronic device fabrication that inform her unique problem-solving skills and varied research interests. Trisha is a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellow, a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator, a L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellow, a 3M Nontenured Faculty Award winner, and was named as one Forbes’ magazine “30 Under 30” Innovators in Energy.

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Dr. Xi Chen | Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Dr. Xi Chen is a Research Associate Polymer Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory researching polymer-ceramic composite electrolytes for high energy lithium batteries.

Dr. Chen received a B.S. in Applied Chemistry from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2011 Following this, she began her career as a postdoc at Lawrence Berkley national lab investigating functional block copolymer membranes.

ORNL Profile

Prof. Jinsang Kim | University of Michigan

Jinsang Kim is the Director of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, and a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering having a joint appointment in the Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds a M.S (1993) and a B.S. (1991) from Seoul National University, Korea, both in Fiber and Polymer Science. He earned his Ph.D. in 2001 in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT (Advisor Prof. Tim Swager), where he studied the design, synthesis, and assembly of conjugated sensory polymers and energy transport properties in controlled structures. He is also an expert in genetically engineered protein research. His postdoctoral work in this area at Caltech (Advisor Prof. David Tirrell) involved the expression of artificial genes to determine the extent to which artificial genetic information can be used to encode supramolecular assembly in macromolecular systems.

He has won several prestigious awards including the Monroe-Brown Foundation Research Excellent Award, NSF CAREER Award, Holt Award for excellent teaching, IUPAC Prize for Young Chemist, and the ACS ICI Award. He was also named one of the emerging investigators by the Journal of Materials Chemistry in 2007. His current research interests at UM are plastic electronics, self-signal amplifying molecular biosensors, highly emissive organic emitters, and high performance polymers. His research has been sponsored by NSF BES, NSF ECS, NSF DMR, AFOSR, ARO, DoE, NIH, ACS, KIMM, KRF, QIA, Qatar NRF, Ford, Samsung, LG Chem, and Center for Chemical Genomics.

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Prof. Amir Sheikhi | Penn State University

Dr. Amir Sheikhi founded the Bio-Soft Materials Laboratory (B-SMaL) at Penn State in August 2019 to tackle some of the quintessential challenges of the 21st century in biomedicine and the environment by designing novel bio-based soft material platforms via micro- and nanoengineering techniques. Amir’s lab consists of 10 graduate students, 1 postdoctoral fellow, and more than 15 undergraduate researchers, supported by $3+M of funding, including NIH R01 and R56 grants. Amir’s research has been featured in more than 60 publications, 50 seminars, and 14 reports of invention/patent applications with recognition by over 40 news media outlets. He is the recipient of several major awards, including the AIChE’s 35 Under 35, The 2022 ACS Unilever Award for Outstanding Young Investigator in Colloid & Surfactant Science, The John C. Chen Young Professional Leadership Scholarship, UNIFOR Global Research Fellowship.

Recently, Amir was named as one of the 9 emerging leaders in Chemical and Biomedical Engineering worldwide, featured on the cover of the Inaugural “Futures” Issue of Bioengineering & Translational Medicine journal. Amir earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at McGill University and continued to complete two years of postdoctoral research on Colloids and Macromolecules at McGill Chemistry. Before joining Penn State, Amir was a postdoctoral fellow in Engineering in Medicine/Bioengineering at Harvard Medical School and UCLA. Amir is currently an Associate Editor of Bioengineering & Translational Medicine and is on the editorial board of Biomaterials and Bioactive Materials.

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