Sponsored by NOVA Chemicals Corporation
The Macromolecular Science and Engineering Award is presented to an individual who, while residing in Canada, has made a distinguished contribution to macromolecular science or engineering.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2021 winner of the Macromolecular Science and Engineering Award is:
Jean Duhamel, MCIC
University of Waterloo
Jean Duhamel obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1989 at the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine (France) with Dr. André where he learned about the fundamentals of fluorescence. From 1990 to 1993, he was a post-doctoral fellow with Prof. Winnik at the University of Toronto (Canada) where he applied fluorescence to study polymers in solution. In 1993, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania (USA) as a post-doctoral fellow to study oligonucleotides by fluorescence anisotropy with Prof. Ponzy Lu. In 1996, he joined the University of Waterloo where he is now full professor. At Waterloo, his research focused on applying pyrene excimer fluorescence to characterize the internal dynamics and structure of macromolecules in solution. His key contribution was the development of new mathematical models that enabled the interpretation of these experiments to obtain truly novel information about a variety of different polymer systems such as synthetic dendrimers and polymeric bottlebrushes and natural polysaccharides and polypeptides. He held a Tier-2 Canada Research Chair from 2002 to 2011. He obtained an Ontario Premier Research Excellence Award in 2002. Since 2011, he is the Director of the Institute for Polymer Research at Waterloo.