UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor M. Scott Shell has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with nearly sixty thousand members from more than one hundred ten countries. The institute’s highest grade of membership, achieved only through election by the Board of Directors, recognizes Fellows for their significant professional accomplishments and contributions to engineering. 

“I am remarkably fortunate to have grown up professionally in the chemical engineering community, where I have been continuously inspired by incredibly talented mentors, collaborators, colleagues, and students,” said Shell, vice chair of the chemical Engineering Department and the John Myers Founder’s Chair of Chemical Engineering. “This distinction carries significant personal weight because it comes from an organization of experts that I have worked closely with throughout my career.”

The Shell lab develops molecular-simulation, multiscale modeling, and statistical-thermodynamic approaches to address problems in biophysics and soft materials. His research group pioneered the relative entropy coarse-graining approach, a multiscale modeling technique that enables large-scale simulations of a wide range of complex molecular systems. The approach takes small-scale atomic simulations as input and produces accurate coarse-grained models that can be simulated at much larger scales. The technique has had a substantial impact on modeling, leading to a new class of advanced coarse-graining algorithms to enable simulations of a wide range of problems. For example, Shell plays an integral part in numerous interdisciplinary centers and institutes at UCSB, participating in projects with focuses that range from water-filtration membranes and bio-derived materials and technologies, to plastic-waste recycling and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

Shell has published regularly in this area, and his article, Systematic coarse-graining of potential energy landscapes and dynamics in liquid, published in the Journal of Chemical Physics in 2012, was one of eighty seminal papers in the journal’s history selected for its 80th Anniversary Collection.  

The Shell lab has continued to push the boundaries of what molecular modeling can do, using the relative-entropy approach to understand and accurately simulate a wide range of phenomena. Most recently, his group pioneered computational techniques for the inverse design of soft materials, such as chemically patterned surfaces to program solute-to-surface interactions in aqueous solutions. 

An elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Shell previously received an Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Impact Award by the Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum (CoMSEF) of the AIChE, as well as the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award and Distinguished Teaching Award from UCSB’s Academic Senate. 

Shell, who joined the UCSB faculty in 2007, has published nearly one hundred articles, delivered more than one-hundred-twenty invited talks at major meetings and institutions around the world, and written a textbook, Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics: An Integrated Approach, which has been adopted by more than one hundred thirty departments worldwide.

Shell has played an active role in AIChE since 2007, having sat on programming committee and served as a session chair during the annual meeting. Over the years, he also launched three new session series at the annual meeting to benefit the thermodynamics community. Shell has been highly committed to the issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, leading efforts at UCSB to support students from diverse backgrounds and to engage the community in creating an inclusive and equitable environment. 

AIChE will recognize Shell and other newly elected Fellows during its national conference later this year.