The Cooperative Research Award in Polymer Science and Engineering recognizes the cooperative research among industrial, academic, and national laboratory scientists. The winner of the 2025 Cooperative Research Award is the collaborative research team of Dr. James L Hedrick of the IBM Almaden Research Center and Prof. Yi Yan Yang of Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI) of A*STAR, Singapore.
Dr. James Hendrick, IBM Almaden Research Center
Prof. Yi Yan Yang, A*STAR Singapore
Over the course of more than 15 years, this team established and sustained a deep and highly productive collaborative research program to address the important and pressing global health challenges of multi-drug resistant diseases. The team leveraged deep and complementary expertise in data driven materials discovery to design, synthesize, characterize, and test new polymeric therapeutics and through this collaborative effort created platform technologies based on exquisitely designed polymers that address key issues in multidrug-resistance bacteria, cancer therapy, and viral infections. Their sustained collaborative effort resulted in 60 joint patents and more than 130 joint peer reviewed papers and their breakthrough research has received significant press coverage in publications such as Forbes, Fortune, Financial Times, The Economist, and Wired.
The PMSE Division extends its congratulations to the award winners and thanks all nominators for their submissions. Nominations for the 2026 Cooperative Research Award are accepted any time prior to the deadline of August 1, 2025. Please forward nominations to the Chair of the PMSE Cooperative Research Award Committee, Dr. Howard Creel, 3M. hscreel@mmm.com.