Michigan State’s Lawrence Drzal and Daniel Wagner from the Weizmann Institute of Science have been selected to receive the 2016 Medal of Excellence in Composite Materials. The two will be honored at the American Society for Composites annual technical conference, to be held from Sept. 19-22 in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Established in 1984 to mark the decennial celebration of the University of Delaware Center for Composite Materials (CCM), the medal has since been awarded to 36 individuals from across the world including the two current winners.

Designed by Charles Parks, a local sculptor with an international reputation, the medal is a three-inch diameter bronze casting bearing the likenesses of the four initial winners: Zvi Hashin, Tsuyoshi Hayashi, Anthony Kelly, and Stephen W. Tsai. Recipients are chosen by a committee of past medal winners.

Criteria for the award include significant contributions to the field of composite materials through leadership, scholarly endeavor, invention and/or economic enterprise over a sustained period of years.

Lawrence T. Drzal

Drzal is University Distinguished Professor in the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Department in the College of Engineering at Michigan State University and director of the Composite Materials and Structures Center at MSU.

From 1991-99 he was co-director of the NSF State/Industry/University Center for Low-Cost, High-Speed Polymer Composites Processing at MSU, and he was recently appointed director of the Vehicle Technical Application Area in the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI).

His research is primarily in adhesion and the fiber-matrix interphase in polymer-matrix composite materials reinforced with carbon, glass, polymeric and biobased fibers and in multifunctional composites in which graphene nanoplatelets, cellulose nanofibers, and other nanoparticles are added to the fiber-matrix interphase.

Drzal has over 400 peer-reviewed research papers and 35 patents, and he was designated a “Highly Cited Researcher in Material Science” by ISIHighlyCited.com. He has received research awards from the Adhesion Society, the U.S. Air Force Materials Laboratory, the American Society for Composites, 3M and Dow Corning.

Drzal is a fellow of the American Society for Composites, the Adhesion Society, the American Institute of Chemists, the Society of Plastics Engineers, and the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. In 2007, he co-founded XG Sciences, Inc., a private Michigan company that is currently the world’s largest manufacturer of graphene nanoplatelets using processes and technologies developed in his lab at MSU. He serves as its chief scientist.

H. Daniel Wagner

Wagner is the Livio Norzi Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. He spent three years at Cornell University as a postdoctoral associate and lecturer before joining the Weizmann Institute in 1986.

Wagner is the author of over 250 papers and various chapters in books. His current scientific interests include the micromechanics of advanced composites and their interfaces, novel man-made materials such as carbon nanotubes and nanocomposites, and the mechanics of natural and nature-inspired structures.

He is a fellow of several professional societies and also holds a number of patents in the area of composites. He has been a visiting professor at various institutions, including the Max Planck Institute in Golm-Potsdam, the Ecole Centrale in Paris, the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, the Centre de Recherches Paul Pascal in Bordeaux, Exxon Research and Engineering in Annandale, New Jersey, and more.

In 2000, Wagner was elected chairman of the Gordon Research Conference on Composites in Ventura, California, and in 2013 he was invited to present the Harvard-MIT Joint Nanomaterials Special Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently he was chairman of the COMPO2014 Nanocomposites and Biocomposites conference at the Weizmann Institute. He is the recipient of a number of prizes and awards, among them the 1991 Fiber Society Award (USA), 2010 Gutwirth Research Prize (Israel), the 2014 Christoffel Plantin Prize (Belgium), and the 2014 Landau Prize in Chemical and Materials Engineering (Israel).