Rate My Professor Samuel I. Stupp

Samuel I. Stupp is the Board of Trustees Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He serves as Director of the Center for Regenerative Nanomedicine and Director of the Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science. Stupp earned a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University in 1977. His career includes early appointments as Assistant Professor of Biological Materials at Northwestern University from 1977 to 1980, followed by positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1980 to 1999, where he advanced from Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Bioengineering to Swanlund Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, and Bioengineering. Since joining Northwestern in 1999, he has held leadership roles including Director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine from 2000 to 2014 and Director of the Simpson Querrey Institute from 2014 to 2024.

Research in the Stupp laboratory integrates chemistry with materials science, biology, and medicine, emphasizing supramolecular self-assembly to develop functional organic nanostructures for energy and medical applications. In energy science, efforts focus on materials for solar photovoltaics, catalytic solar fuels, supramolecular ferroelectrics, and artificial muscles. In medicine, biomaterials target regenerative applications for the brain, spinal cord, bone, cartilage, and muscle, as well as targeted drug delivery for cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Key publications include "Self-Assembly and Mineralization of Peptide-Amphiphile Nanofibers" in Science (2001), "Bioactive Scaffolds with Enhanced Supramolecular Motion Promote Recovery from Spinal Cord Injury" in Science (2021), "Peptide Programming of a Supramolecular Vinylidene Fluoride Ferroelectric Phase" in Nature (2024), and "A Bioactive Supramolecular and Covalent Polymer Scaffold for Cartilage Repair in a Sheep Model" in PNAS (2024). Stupp has received major awards such as election to the National Academy of Sciences (2020) and National Academy of Engineering (2012), the Materials Research Society Von Hippel Award (2022), the American Chemical Society Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry (2022), and the Royal Society of Chemistry Soft Matter and Biophysical Chemistry Award (2016). He is a member of multiple editorial advisory boards, including ACS Central Science, Nano Letters, and Biomaterials Science, and is recognized among the top 1% highly cited researchers by Web of Science.