The Adolphe Merkle Institute Chair of Polymer Chemistry and Materials, Prof. Christoph Weder, has been honored with the 2022 Anselme Payen Award of the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Cellulose and Renewable Materials Division.

The award, which includes a medal and an honorarium, is given to honor and encourage "outstanding professional contributions to the science and chemical technology of cellulose and its allied products". The prize is named after of Anselme Payen, a 19^th-century French pioneer in the chemistry of both cellulose and lignin. His research led notably to the discovery of cellulose.

In a statement, the ACS division said that Prof. Weder “is known as an imaginative scientist whose research is situated at the interface of chemistry and materials science and engineering. His main research interests are the design, synthesis, and investigation of novel functional polymers, in particular stimuli-responsive polymers, bio-inspired materials, supramolecular systems, and polymer nanoomposites. Cellulose nanocrystals constitute one of the most important building blocks that his group uses to create such materials.”

Weder, who is also AMI’s Director, is a Fellow of the ACS’ Division of Polymer Chemistry since 2017.

The full ACS statement can be read here: “Professor Christoph Weder is the 2022 Anselme Payen Award winner”.