The Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering is endowed by the AIChE Foundation in the name of fluid-dynamics pioneer Andreas Acrivos of the City College of New York. The prize recognizes outstanding progress in chemical engineering by an AIChE member in their early career.
The recipient of the 2026 Acrivos Award is Dr. M. Scott Shell, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is being recognized “for groundbreaking research in molecular simulation and for his outstanding textbook integrating thermodynamics with statistical mechanics.”
He and the other Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients will be honored at the 2026 AIChE Annual Meeting, November 8–12 in Minneapolis.
Shell earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 2005, where he worked with Professors Pablo Debenedetti and Athanassios Panagiotopoulos on thermodynamics of supercooled liquids and molecular simulation methods. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in computational protein biophysics with Prof. Ken Dill at UC San Francisco.
About Shell and his work
Shell's research develops molecular simulation, multiscale modeling, and statistical thermodynamic approaches for understanding and designing soft materials, solution formulations, and biomolecular systems. His work is particularly known for information-theoretic approaches to molecular coarse-graining and multiscale modeling, and spans water structure and water-mediated interactions, protein self-assembly and aggregation, membrane and interface design, and complex solution formulations. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers and the textbook Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics: An Integrated Approach, published by Cambridge University Press.
At UCSB, Shell is Associate Director and UCSB Site Lead of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems, Area Co-Lead of the NSF BioPACIFIC Materials Innovation Platform, an IRG Co-Lead in the NSF-supported Materials Research Laboratory, and a co-PI of the NIH Maximizing Access to Research Careers program. He has also been extensively involved in graduate education and research mentoring.
His honors include an NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, AIChE Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum Impact Award, UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award and Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, and election as a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Read about other recipients of 2026 AIChE Institute and Board of Directors' Awards.
