Jonathan Rivnay, Northwestern University, has received the Outstanding Early-Career Investigator Award “for innovative research on organic semiconductor microstructure and charge transport for electronics and bioelectronics.” This award recognizes outstanding, interdisciplinary scientific work in materials research by an early-career scientist or engineer. The recipient must also show exceptional promise as a developing leader in the materials area. Rivnay’s research group designs and develops new materials and devices to facilitate the seamless integration of sensing/actuation technologies with biological cells and tissue to enable improvements in diagnosis and therapy. The group’s research focuses on active materials such as conducting polymers because of their synthetic tunability, soft mechanical properties, demonstrated stability and compatibility with biological tissue, and their ability to take on a broad range of form factors, from ultrathin and flexible to fibrous and scaffold-like.

Rivnay is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He earned his BS degree in materials science and engineering in 2006 from Cornell University. He then moved to Stanford University, where he earned MSc and PhD degrees in materials science and engineering. In 2012, he joined the Department of Bioelectronics at the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne in France as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, working on conducting polymer-based devices for bioelectronics.

Rivnay spent 2015–2016 as a member of the research staff in the Printed Electronics Group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, a Xerox Co.) before joining the faculty at Northwestern in 2017. He is the recipient of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (2018) and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship (2019).