Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) honors materials scientist Professor Anna Balazs from the University of Pittsburgh, USA, with the 2025 Gutenberg Research Award. This award is JGU's most eminent research prize, endowed with EUR 10,000 and conferred annually by the Gutenberg Research College (GRC), the central institution designed to promote top-level research at Mainz University. The award ceremony will be held on May 12, 2025, during the GRC's annual meeting. During her stay in Mainz, Balazs will engage in scientific dialogues and knowledge exchange with her colleagues at JGU and deliver a lecture in the JGU Physics Colloquium series.

"Anna Balazs is a world-renowned pioneer in materials theory and soft matter science, and she has made exceptional research contributions to the field of so-called smart materials. She is an inspiration to her colleagues in the scientific community, and she is a role model for early career scientists and for young women scientists in particular," emphasized Professor Mita Banerjee, Director of the GRC. "Her most recent research has resulted in the collaborative project 'Confine: Sculpting Confined Fluids for Transport using Self-Organization and Information Transfer', which is conducted in association with a research team led by Professor Andreas Walther of JGU. This project is jointly sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the USA. Professor Andreas Walther is also the spokesperson of the CoM2Life research initiative, for which Mainz University has recently submitted a proposal in Germany’s Excellence Strategy program for the recognition as a Cluster of Excellence. By conferring the Gutenberg Research Award on Anna Balazs, we are not only paying tribute to her outstanding scientific achievements, our aim is also to strengthen her existing links with top-level research here at JGU."

Collaboration with the CoM2Life research cluster at JGU

Anna Balazs received her B.A. Physics degree in 1975 from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She subsequently studied materials science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where she also obtained her Ph.D. in 1981. She has been Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh since 1987. "Anna Balazs' work focuses on the investigation of polymer-based materials and the computer modeling of these materials," explained Professor Friederike Schmid of the JGU Institute of Physics, who nominated Balazs for the Gutenberg Research Award.

She is one of the few theoretical researchers in this field capable of developing innovative material-related concepts as well as computational methods to test and refine them. Her theoretical predictions have frequently sparked collaborations with experimental researchers, leading to groundbreaking discoveries that reshape our understanding of fundamental principles in soft materials.

Anna Balazs has received several research awards, including the Polymer Physics Prize of the American Physical Society, the S F Boys-A Rahman Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Langmuir Lectureship Award of the American Chemical Society. She is a member of numerous scientific societies. In 2021, Balazs was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a non-profit organization that advises the US government on scientific matters. She was elected to the NAS in recognition of her "creative and imaginative work in predicting the behavior of soft materials composed of multiple cooperatively-interacting components."