Rigoberto “Gobet” Advincula, a leader in advanced materials, polymers and nanomaterials with joint appointments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been named to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology.
Advincula is a UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair Professor and leader of ORNL’s Macromolecular Nanomaterials group. The influential advisory council on which he now sits offers guidance to government entities on how to use the chemical sciences to solve complex, wide-ranging societal problems affecting the environment and public health. He will take his place on the committee at the board’s upcoming meeting in May.
The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and world. Potential members can only be nominated by those already in the academy, which makes induction into the group one of the highest professional honors that can be accorded to an engineer. As of February 2024, it had a U.S. membership of 2,310 and 332 members from other countries.
Advincula is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Chemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry. He has been at Oak Ridge since 2020, when he became a governor’s chair, a joint position between ORNL and UT’s Tickle College of Engineering. Prior to that, he was a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Advincula’s research focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization of polymers and nanomaterials capable of controlled-assembly and self-organization, and he holds more than a dozen patents related to nanomaterials, smart coatings and films, solid-state device fabrication and chemical additives. At ORNL, he has further established initiatives and programs related to additive manufacturing and application of artificial intelligence in process optimization.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
