Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering
John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering
Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering
Professor: Material Science & Engineering, Macromolecular Science & Engineering, Physics, Applied Physics
Sharon C. Glotzer is the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, John Werner Cahn Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, Applied Physics, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Materials Research Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. She received her B.S. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Ph.D. degree from Boston University, both in physics. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in 2001, she worked for eight years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology where she was co-founder and Director of the NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science.
Professor Glotzer’s research on computational assembly science and engineering aims toward predictive materials design of colloidal and soft matter, and is sponsored by the NSF, DOE, DOD and Simons Foundation. Among her notable findings, Glotzer’s introduction of the notion of “patchy particles,” a conceptual approach to nanoparticle design, has informed wide-ranging investigations of self-assembly. She showed that entropy alone can assemble shapes into many structures, which has implications for materials science, thermodynamics, mathematics, and nanotechnology. Her group’s “shape space diagram” shows how matter self-organizes based on the shapes of the constituent elements, making it possible to predict what kind of material—glass, crystal, liquid crystal, plastic crystal, or quasicrystal—will emerge.
Glotzer runs a large computational research group of 30 students, postdocs, and research staff, and has published over 300 refereed papers and presented over 350 plenary, keynote and invited talks around the world. She has provided leadership and input on roadmapping for federal granting agencies on many research topics, and has been a leading advocate for simulation-based materials research, including nanotechnology and high performance computing, serving on boards and advisory committees of the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Academies. She is currently a member of the National Academies Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology. She is a Simons Investigator, a former National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow, and the recipient of numerous other awards and honors, including the 2019 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics from the American Physical Society, the 2018 Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum and the 2016 Alpha Chi Sigma Awards both from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the 2017 Materials Communications Lecture Award and 2014 MRS Medal from the Materials Research Society.
To read Prof. Sharon Glotzer’s full Bio please visit her official profile on the ChE website