Jiaxing Huang Named Guggenheim Fellow

Jiaxing Huang, associate professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Huang joins a number of scholars, academics, scientists, artists, poets, filmmakers, and other global thought leaders honored by the yearly prize.

“I am deeply honored and humbled to receive this fellowship,” Huang says.

“Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has always bet everything on the individual, and we’re thrilled to continue the tradition with this wonderfully talented and diverse group,” Foundation President Edward Hirsch said in a statement. “It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to.”

Selected from a group of almost 3,000 applicants, this year's 178 honorees came from 56 different disciplines and were chosen based on “prior achievement and exceptional promise.”

Huang’s research focuses on the application of soft materials, organic nanocrystals, and metal nanostructures in energy and sustainability. His best-known research examines two-dimensional soft-layered materials, such as graphene oxide. He pioneered the conception of these single-atomic layered sheets as a soft material and advocated the study of their properties as polymers, colloids, amphiphiles, and membranes.

Daniel Diermeier, IBM Professor of Regulation and Competitive Practice at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, was also named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.