Christopher Bates, a senior participant in BioPACIFIC MIP and an assistant professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Materials Department, is one of sixteen junior faculty nationwide to receive a 2021 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. Managed by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the awards program supports junior faculty, who have demonstrated leadership in both research and education. Bates will receive $100,000 in unrestricted research funding to support his work to study the self-assembly of bottlebrush copolymers.

Bates, who also has courtesy appointments in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, plans to use organic chemistry as a means of synthesizing the new materials, followed by exploiting the world-class characterization facilities at UCSB — particularly at BioPACIFIC MIP, the Materials Research Laboratory, and the California NanoSystems Institute — to measure properties. His methods will create a feedback loop to allow researchers to go back and optimize the design of molecules to test their hypotheses about properties or to maximize performance for some specific application.