UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor M. Scott Shell has been selected as the winner of the 2026 Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering, one of the most prestigious awards given by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). This award, given annually by the AIChE, highlights a single researcher’s significant contribution to the field of chemical engineering, such as a theoretical discovery or development of a new principle in the chemical engineering field.  
 
Shell and his research group are known for their role in developing a fundamental theoretical framework for multiscale modeling, which allows researchers to understand and predict the behavior of complex molecular systems. The AIChE will present him with the award at the organization’s annual meeting in November in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Scott Shell's award reflects the importance of his work in multiscale modeling, which has led to numerous collaborations in biophysics and soft materials across campus." said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. "This recognition allows him to continue to deepen his pursuit of the theoretical foundations of chemical engineering."
 
An award that supports theoretical work is particularly meaningful, Shell said. “I’ve always followed my gut towards areas and ideas that are quietly interesting, have conceptual puzzles, and seem like an opportunity to decipher something more fundamental,” he said. “That doesn’t always take you in the flashiest research direction or towards the most immediately applied results.”  
 
Yet it’s a direction that his field respects. “What I’ve always appreciated about chemical engineering as a field is its value of the elegance and impact of working out difficult problems from a fundamental point of view,” he said. The award from the AIChE, he said, “recognizes that type of intellectual investment, and reminds me how lucky I am to be in this professional community and to have mentors and colleagues that nurture it.”
 
Connecting Across Scale
 
As a chemical engineer, Shell said, “you need to be able to view the world at different resolutions and understand how the simple, larger-scale pictures are rooted in the more detailed atomic-scale interactions.” He and his lab approached this through a concept called relative entropy, creating models that “allows you to formally make those connections between scales and to practically generate simplified but accurate models of complex systems, which then allow you to perform large-scale simulations that would otherwise be impossible.”
 
Shell, whose background is in molecular thermodynamics and simulation methods, said that the framework itself was born from necessity. When he arrived at UCSB, in 2007, “there were so many exciting problems and new collaborative opportunities that I realized we couldn't quite tackle with existing simulation capabilities, so we started to lay down a theory that would let us extend them.”
The framework he and his team has opened up new directions in the lab’s projects and applications, and continues to help their research evolve, he said.  
 
For Shell, the award has ripple effects beyond his own research, reminding him “of important messages to consistently communicate as a mentor, particularly to students launching research careers: that there's high value in working on fundamental science, and that some fraction of your research portfolio should preserve those gut-driven, longer term discovery pathways involving creative but careful exploration.”
 
It’s a message he plans on trying to listen to as well: “I'm hoping this will allow me to grant myself a little more time for pen-and-paper theory work on my own, which I love.”