Professor Lodge receives NSSA Sustained Research Prize

Regents Professor Timothy P. Lodge received the 2020 Sustained Research Prize of the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA). He was honored for his pivotal contributions to the fundamental understanding of polymer structure, thermodynamics, and dynamics through the use of small angle neutron scattering.

The Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) established the Sustained Research Prize to recognize a sustained contribution to a scientific subfield, or subfields, using neutron scattering techniques, or a sustained contribution to the development of neutron scattering techniques. 

Professor Lodge is a recognized leader in the use of neutron scattering to study the structure and thermodynamics of polymers, including polymer chain dimensions, critical phenomena, and macromolecular self-assembly. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) has played a key role in his research addressing these phenomena. His work is regarded as being exceptional in both creativity and technical depth, and has helped to define how neutron methods can be used to understand polymer self-assembly and thermodynamics. In this way, his work is in no small part responsible for the prominent role of neutron scattering in the field of polymer physics.

Throughout his four decade professional career, Professor Lodge has made extensive use of SANS to gain fundamental understanding of polymers, contributing important ideas to experimental design and modeling. One area in which his contributions were particularly influential is in tailoring polymer chemistries for SANS so as to extract maximal, or otherwise unachievable, information from neutron scattering measurements. This includes his discovery and fundamental investigations of block polymer-stabilized bicontinuous microemulsions, where he and his group carefully designed co-polymer molecules to identify the thin regions of thermodynamic space where bicontinuous morphologies form and can be studied. Such studies have become guiding examples for how polymer design can be used in concert with neutron scattering to characterize interfacial properties of multi-phase polymers and soft materials more generally.

Regents Professor Lodge earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, and was a National Research Council postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1981 before joining the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1982. He has received numerous awards and accolades for his research, including Hermann Mark Award from the American Chemical Society, and Fellowship in the NSSA as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science.