Qian Chen

Prof. Qian Chen is currently a professor and Racheff Scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She got her PhD degree from the same department with Prof. Steve Granick (2012). She completed her Miller postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Paul Alivisatos at the University of California, Berkeley. She became a faculty in 2015 and since then has received awards for the research in her group, such as the Forbes 30 under 30 Science List (2016), the AFOSR YIP (2017), the NSF CAREER award (2018), the Sloan Research Fellow in Chemistry (2018), the ACS Unilever Award (2018), the Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Scientist Award (2022), the Soft Matter Lectureship (2023), the Provost's Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring (2024), the MRS Outstanding Early-Career Investigator Award (2024), and the ACS Langmuir lectureship (2025). Her group’s research focuses on imaging, understanding, and engineering soft, biological, and energy materials at the nanoscale.