Nicholas A. Kotov, Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, won the 2022 Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Award (NSEF), from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) for his “discovery of chiral nanostructures with large amplitude optical activity and establishing chemical principles for their engineering.” This annual award from the Institute “recognizes outstanding contributions to the advancement of nanoscale science and engineering in the field of Chemical Engineering through scholarship, education or service.”
Kotov’s research has shaped the field of chiral nanostructures. Examples of his work include the elaboration of pathways by which chirality transfers between different forms of matter, a toolbox for the design of chiral nanostructures based on chemical physics and, more recently, discrete mathematics enabling rigorous description of the relationships between complexity and chirality.
“Nick’s body of work on chiral inorganic nanomaterials transcends multiple disciplines from chemical engineering to materials and medicine, says Sharon C. Glotzer, Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering. “His work continues to inspire many other scientists as well as the next generation of engineers to work on the ever-exciting and vital area of chirality.”
In 2020, Nick was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Inventors for practical implementations of biomimetic chiral nanoparticles and nanocomposites; in the same year, he also received AIChE’s Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research and the Distinguished Irving Langmuir Professorship in Chemical Sciences and Engineering.
Selected publications:
J. Yeom, B. Yeom, H. Chan, K. W. Smith, S. Dominguez-Medina, J. Hwan Bahng, G. Zhao, W.S. Chang, S.J. Chang, A. Chuvilin, D. Melnikau, A. L. Rogach, P. Zhang, S. Link, P. Král, N. A. Kotov, Chiral Templating of Self-Assembling Nanostructures by Circularly Polarized Light, Nature Mater., 2015, 14, 66–72.
T. Hu, B. P. Isaacoff, J. H. Bahng, C. Hao, Y. Zhou, J. Zhu, X. Li, Z. Wang, S. Liu, C. Xu, J. S. Biteen, N. A. Kotov, Self-Organization of Plasmonic and Excitonic Nanoparticles into Resonant Chiral Supraparticle Assemblies, Nano Letters, 2014, 14 (12), 6799–6810.
W. Jiang, Z.-B. Qu, P. Kumar, D. Vecchio, Y. Wang, Y. Ma, J. H. Bahng, K.Bernardino, W. R. Gomes, F. M. Colombari, A. Lozada-Blanco, M. Veksler, E. Marino, A. Simon, C. Murray, S. Ricardo Muniz, A. F. de Moura, N. A. Kotov, Emergence of Complexity in Hierarchically Organized Chiral Particles, Science, 2020, 368, 6491, 642-648.
