Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese named McKnight Land-Grant Professor
Assistant Professor Michelle Calabrese is among twelve recipients of the 2024-2026 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. This University-wide program seeks to advance the careers of the most promising junior faculty members who have potential to make significant contributions to their departments and scholarly fields. Recipients were chosen based on merit, professional promise, quality of publication record, and originality and innovation in research achievements.
Calabrese was awarded for her research on engineering complex fluids for healthcare, sustainability and advanced materials. Calabrese's research group addresses grand societal challenges by engineering new complex fluids and soft materials: structured fluids or soft solids like those found in consumer products, vaccines, and biomedical materials. To create technologies for applications including drug delivery and sustainability, the group synthesizes polymers and nanoparticles, and then precisely characterizes their structure and flow behavior. Understanding the fundamental relationship between material structure, flow properties and performance then enables development of new materials with finely-controlled properties.
Congratulations Michelle!