ACS Award In Colloid & Surface Chemistry

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As a child, Steve Granick loved to travel with his family and explore “different cities, countries, and beautiful places around the world,” he says. It’s fortuitous, then, that he became a scientist: The vocation, he explains, affords him the opportunity to travel the world both literally and figuratively.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Granick worked in Paris. And now, as a professor of chemistry, physics, and materials science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he regularly interacts with scientists from around the globe. He’s also had visiting professorships in France and Japan.

Because of the varied nature of his research, Granick traverses the world of science every day, too. He and his multidisciplinary troop of students investigate phenomena as varied as fluid behavior on hydrophobic surfaces, particle motion, and lipid mobility in cell membranes.

“We want to understand everyday life,” Granick says, noting that the element that connects his various research interests is frequently surface science. “Look around you. Everything is a surface, from the table my hand rests on to my eyelids, moving up and down and lubricating my eyes.” Understanding molecule, particle, and fluid behavior at interfaces leads to discoveries about how life works, he says.

Although Granick is loath to point out any particular career highlights (he’s loved all of his eclectic research projects equally, he tells C&EN), his colleagues regularly heap accolades on his work with Janus interfaces.

In 2002, Granick and his group determined how water behaved when confined between a hydrophobic and hydrophilic surface (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1066141). “It was our attempt to understand why water beads up on a raincoat,” Granick says of the project. “What we observed was that the water thrashed around and was very unhappy.” The liquid fluctuated on a specific timescale, which the researchers measured and described mathematically.

“Steve is one of the world’s top experimentalists in the area of confined and interfacial fluids,” says Pablo G. Debenedetti, a chemical and biological engineer at Princeton University.

Since that original Janus study, Granick’s group has continued to examine dual-natured interfaces, putting a twist on them by producing half-hydrophobic, half-hydrophilic colloidal particles. The Janus spheres, as they’re called, can self-assemble into complex shapes such as rods and fibrils (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1197451).

Granick received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Princeton in 1978 before heading to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for a Ph.D. with famed polymer scientist John D. Ferry.

From Wisconsin, Granick moved to the Collège de France in 1983 to do a postdoc with soft-matter scientist and Nobel Laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. Granick then held another postdoc position in 1984 at the University of Minnesota before taking up his post in Illinois, where he’s remained ever since.

Among his many honors, Granick received the Polymer Physics Prize from the American Physical Society in 2009. And although he’s quite proud of the award, he is quick to point out that any honor he is given is actually being bestowed upon the students who did the work. Producing creative, motivated students who go on to independent careers is a reward in itself, Granick says. “I just try not to get in their way.”

Granick will present the award address before the ACS Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry.