M. Scott Shell

Biography

Prof. M. Scott Shell is the Myers Founders Chair Professor and Vice Chair of Chemical Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. He earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton in 2005, followed by a postdoc in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UC San Francisco from 2005-07. He is the recipient of a Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award (2007), an NSF CAREER Award (2009), a Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship (2010), a Northrop-Grumman Teaching Award (2011), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2012), a UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award (2014), the Dudley A. Saville Lectureship at Princeton (2015), and the CoMSEF Impact Award from AIChE (2017).

Research

Prof. Shell’s group develops novel molecular simulation, multiscale modeling, and statistical thermodynamic approaches to address problems in contemporary biophysics and soft condensed matter. Recent areas of interest include self-assembled peptide materials, nanobubbles, hydrophobic interfaces, water purification membranes, and colloid-polymer materials.