Dr. Yuanzhe Liang, who recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Materials Science at Vanderbilt University, was awarded the first annual Vanderbilt IMS Best Student Paper Award for his work entitled “Polyamide nanofiltration membrane with highly uniform sub-nanometre pores for sub-1 Angstrom precision separation”. The award comes with a $500 prize and a corresponding plaque. This work was completed under the guidance of Prof. Shihong Lin of the Vanderbilt University Department of Civil Engineering and in collaboration with researchers within the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Soochow University (China), The National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, and Yale University. In this work, the authors developed a process called surfactant-assembly regulated interfacial polymerization (SARIP) to control the size of pores in separations membranes down to the single atom scale. This
allowed for unprecedented control of size dependent diffusive transport separations (sieving) of solutes with scalable fabrication with highly uniform pore size. Congrats to Yuanzhe and the rest of the authors for this excellent contribution that was just published in Nature Communications, 11, 2015 (2020).