Dr. Jodie Lutkenhaus, associate professor and holder of William and Ruth Neely Faculty Fellowship in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, was awarded the Van Ness Award from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The award is presented annually to acknowledge a chemical engineer who has made seminal contributions to the profession.
Each recipient also takes part in the Van Ness Award Lecture Series. Upon receiving the award, Lutkenhaus presented two lectures, “An Introduction to Electroactive Polymer-Based Batteries and Capacitors,” and “Advanced Functional Layer-by-Layer Nanocoatings.” These reflect her research interests on polymeric materials for energy and functional coatings.
The Van Ness Award is the latest in what is growing to be a large number of awards for Lutkenhaus. In 2011, Lutkenhaus received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF); in 2013, Lutkenhaus was received a U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award; in 2014, she was awarded a KANEKA Junior Faculty Scholarship, and named an ACS PMSE Young Investigator (The Polymeric Materials Division of the American Chemical Society); in 2015, Lutkenhaus was named a finalist in the energy category of the 2015 World Technology Network Awards, and became one of the first members of a new NSF Research Traineeship program, “Data-Enabled Discovery and Design of Energy Materials (D3EM).”
Lutkenhaus completed her undergraduate degree at The University of Texas at Austin and earned her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 before joining Texas A&M's chemical engineering department in 2010.