Abigail Delawder, a PhD student in Jonathan Barnes' lab in the Department of Chemistry, was selected to receive a $15,000 Scholar Award from the Philanthropic Education Organization (PEO) Sisterhood. Delawder is one of 100 doctoral students in the United States and Canada selected to receive the award this year.
The PEO Sisterhood, founded in 1869 at Iowa Wesleyan College, is a philanthropic educational organization dedicated to supporting higher education for women. The PEO Scholar Awards were established in 1991 to provide substantial merit-based awards for women of the United States and Canada who are pursuing a doctoral-level degree at an accredited college or university. Scholar Awards recipients are a select group of women chosen for their high level of academic achievement and their potential for having a positive impact on society.
The award will support Delawder's research into the large-scale synthesis of next-generation redox-responsive polymers and light-activated soft materials, as well as the construction of mechanically interlocked molecules and elastic linkers for polymer networks. Potential applications resulting from her research include 4D cell culture of stem cells and tougher stimuli-responsive materials.