Morgan Stefik is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina and is the Founding Director of the South Carolina SAXS Collaborative. He obtained a BE degree in Materials Engineering from California Polytechnic State University in 2005 and a PhD degree in Materials Science from Cornell University in 2010. He then completed postdoctoral research at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His accolades include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2018, recognition as an Emerging Investigator by the Journal of Materials Chemistry A in 2017, a Breakthrough Star Award from the University of South Carolina in 2018, election to the council of the International Mesostructured Materials Association in 2018, selection as an ACS PMSE division Young Investigator in 2020, recognition as an Early Career Scholar by the Journal of Materials Research in 2022, a Garnet Apple Award for Teaching Innovation from the University of South Carolina in 2022, and a Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Fellowship in 2022. Morgan can be found on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/morganstefik
Read Morgan’s Emerging Investigator article http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/D2SM00513A
What aspect of your work are you most excited about at the moment and what do you find most challenging about your research?
I am most excited about kinetic-control broadly and particularly as applied to polymer assemblies. Rather than finding the singular equilibrium arrangement at some condition, kinetic-control opens up the possibility to make infinite different configurations. Some of these new configurations can often enable new and useful properties or help solve existing problems. Reproducibility is a significant challenge with kinetic-control since such processes are inherently pathway-dependent and one often does not know which processing parameters are important at the beginning. Furthermore, many of the characterization techniques are only convenient at the end of processing which makes it that much more difficult to figure out what was happening throughout the entire processing timeline. The tremendous potential for new and exciting capabilities, however, make this challenge worthy of attention from my perspective.
