Our Awardees

Professor John W. Gillespie, Jr.

Donald C. Phillips Professor Emeritus, Departments of Materials Science & Engineering, Civil, Construction, & Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, USA

John W. Gillespie Jr., joined the University of Delaware Center for Composite Materials (UD-CCM) in 1981, serving as Director from 1996 to 2023. Dr. Gillespie is now Donald C. Phillips Emeritus Professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering. Under his leadership, UD-CCM prospered and grew as an internationally recognized center of excellence in composites. During this period, he served as the Principal Investigator on five prestigious Centers of Excellence with the Army Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research, Federal Aviation Association and NASA. He has published more than 1,000 publications with his students and collaborators. He has advised over 100 graduate students and engaged 100’s of research scientists, post-doctoral researchers and undergraduate students in his research. Dr. Gillespie has served as a member of the prestigious and influential National Research Council Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design, and Chair of the National Materials Advisory Board Committee on High-Performance Structural Fibers for Advanced Polymer-Matrix Composites. Dr. Gillespie has been Editor of the Journal of Thermoplastic Composite Materials since 1993. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for Society of Plastic Engineers (SPE) Composites Division.

Dr. Gillespie’s contributions have been recognized through a number of honors and awards. He was a co-recipient of the U.S. Army’s Paul A. Siple Memorial Award and was the first academic recipient of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) Jud Hall Composites Manufacturing Award. He received the American Society for Composites (ASC) Outstanding Research Award, American Society for Civil Engineers Charles Pankow Award for Innovation, and the Wayne W. Stinchcomb Memorial Award from the American Society for Testing and Materials. His team received the CAMX Advanced Composites Excellence (ACE) award and the Delmonte Award for Innovation Excellence by the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE). Dr. Gillespie is a Fellow of SME, ASC, SPE and SAMPE.

Professor Nancy Sottos

Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair and Department Head, Materials Science and Engineering University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, USA

Nancy Sottos holds the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair and is Head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is leader of the Autonomous Materials Systems (AMS) group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, director of the EFRC on Regenerative Energy Efficient Manufacturing of Thermoset Polymeric Materials (REMAT), and director of the University of Illinois spoke of the BP International Center for Advanced Materials (ICAM). Sottos is also a co-founder of the start-up companies Autonomous Materials Inc. (AMI) and RapiCure Solutions. The Sottos group develops polymers and composites capable of self-healing and regeneration, self-reporting, and self-protection to improve reliability and extend material lifetime. Her current research interests focus on circular additive and morphogenic manufacturing strategies for polymeric and composite materials with programmed end of life. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Mechanics, the Society for Engineering Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Sottos is also the recipient of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Nadai Medal and the Society of Engineering Science Medal.