Zhong wins ACS Early Career Award for Polymer Chemistry

Mingjiang Zhong, associate professor of chemical & environmental engineering, has received the 2026 ACS Macro Letters/Biomacromolecules/Macromolecules Early Career Award.

The award, presented jointly by the three ACS journals in partnership with the American Chemical Society's Division of Polymer Chemistry, recognizes two outstanding early-career investigators each year working in any area of fundamental polymer or biopolymer science. Zhong shares this year's honor with Aleksandr V. Zhukhovitskiy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Zhong, who holds secondary appointments in Yale Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Yale’s Department of Chemistry, leads a research group focused on precision polymer synthesis – developing methods that give exact control over polymer topology, tacticity, and monomer sequence. That control, according to an ACS Axial interview with Zhong, allows his lab to translate single-chain behavior into materials for applications spanning energy storage, soft electronics, and environmental water purification.

Zhong earned bachelor's degrees in chemistry and mathematics from Peking University in 2008. He completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University under Krzysztof Matyjaszewski and Tomasz Kowalewski, then carried out postdoctoral research at MIT with Jeremiah Johnson and Bradley Olsen before joining the faculty of Yale Engineering’s Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering in 2016.