M. Scott Shell, PhD

M. Scott Shell is the John E. Myers Founder’s Chair in chemical engineering and vice chair for graduate education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been a faculty member since 2007. His research uses molecular simulation and statistical mechanical theory to understand complex soft materials and biomaterials, with applications ranging from water purification membranes and bio-derived materials to plastic-waste recycling and neurodegenerative diseases. Shell is perhaps best known for introducing the relative entropy approach to coarse-graining — a technique that transforms atomic-scale simulations into accurate large-scale models — which has become a foundational method in the field and was recognized as one of 80 seminal papers in the 80th anniversary collection of the Journal of Chemical Physics. He has published nearly 100 articles and delivered more than 120 invited talks worldwide. Shell is a fellow of both the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received the NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award, among other honors. He completed his postdoctoral training in biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, and earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University, where he was a Hertz Fellow, and his B.S. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.