Rigoberto “Gobet” Advincula, a polymer expert with joint appointments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has earned the George Stafford Whitby Award for Distinguished Teaching and Research, bestowed by the Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society.
The award honors teachers and scientists for distinguished, innovative and inspirational teaching and research in chemistry and polymer science.
Advincula is the leader of the Macromolecular Nanomaterials Group at ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) and an ORNL-UT Governor’s Chair Professor. His research interests include design, synthesis and characterization of polymers and nanomaterials. Understanding structure-composition-property relationships in nanocomposites and elastomers is one of his big contributions to the field. He continues to do this work at the CNMS using artificial intelligence and machine learning workflows.
Advincula is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Materials Research Society and the American Chemical Society. The author of 513 publications, he is credited with 15 issued patents; 4 more are pending. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the International Prize of the Society of Polymer Science of Japan.
The Cabot Corporation, a global specialty chemicals and performance materials company, sponsors the award to honor the memory of George Stafford Whitby, head of the University of Akron’s rubber laboratory and for years the only teacher of rubber chemistry in the United States.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Dawn Levy
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