The ACS presented Professor O'Reilly and Dr Varlas, with the ACS Global Outstanding Graduate Student & Mentor Awards in Polymer Science and Engineering.
The purpose of the award is to recognise excellence in graduate polymer research and recognizes a wining student and supervisor from the USA and another from anywhere in the world.
Professor O’Reilly is Head of the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham and Dr Varlas graduated from Birmingham in 2020 with his doctorate entitled “Tuning the membrane properties of functional polymersomes developed by aqueous polymerization-induced self-assembly (PISA)”. He is now a postdoctoral research associate in the University of Sheffield’s Department of Chemistry. Spyridon was also recently awarded the inaugural M. Zouhair Atassi thesis prize from the School of Chemistry.
The awards are co-organized by Chemical Marketing & Economics, Inc. (CME) and the Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE) Division of the American Chemical Society. To be eligible, students must be within one year to graduation or a recent graduate who has completed an outstanding thesis in polymer research accepted by a university during the three-year period prior to January 1 of the award year. A special symposium at the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago will be organised to celebrate the winners.
