Qian Chen

2026 National Award Finalist — Faculty

Qian Chen

Current Position:
Professor and Racheff Faculty Scholar

Institution:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Discipline:
Materials Science & Nanotechnology

Recognized for: Pioneering “electron videography” to film nanoparticles and proteins in motion, enabling new designs of programmable materials in photonics, sensing, energy, and biomedicine.

Areas of Research Interest and Expertise:
Soft Matter, Self-assembly, In Situ Electron Microscopy, Nanochemistry, Biophysics

Previous Positions:

Associate Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Miller Fellow, University of California, Berkeley (Advisor: A.P. Alivisatos)
PhD, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Advisor: S. Granick)

Research Summary:

It is hard to build better materials when you can’t see how their smallest parts come together. Recent advances by Qian Chen, PhD seek to overcome this barrier. Chen is developing “electron videography,” a set of microscopy methods that record videos of nanoparticles and proteins as they move, almost at the scale of single atoms. These movies show how tiny structures form and change, details that scientists could previously only guess at. Chen’s work is informing researchers on how to design better batteries, drug-delivery particles, and programmable materials with unusual optical and mechanical properties

“A movie is worth a thousand words, especially at the atomic or nanometer scale. Together with the broader scientific community, my group is pushing the boundaries of imaging and analysis to reveal previously inaccessible dynamics in materials and biological systems, translating these insights into advances in manufacturing, sustainability, and healthcare.”

Key Publications:

  1. A. Kim, C. Kim, T. Waltmann, T. Vo, E.M. Kim, J. Kim, Y.-T. Shao, A. Michelson, J. R. Crockett, F. C. Kalutantirige, E. Yang, L. Yao, C.-Y. Hwang, Y. Zhang, Y.-S. Liu, H. An, Z. Gao, J. Kim, S. Mandal, D.A. Muller, K.A. Fichthorn, S.C. Glotzer, Q. Chen. Patchy nanoparticles by atomic stencilling. Nature, 2025. 
  2. C. Qian, E. Stanifer, Z. Ma, L. Yao, B. Luo, C. Liu, J. Li, P. Pan, W. Pan, X. Mao, Q. Chen. Nanoscale phonon dynamics in self-assembled nanoparticle lattices. Nature Materials, 2025. 
  3. S. Zhou, J. Li, J. Lu, H. Liu, J.-Y. Kim, A. Kim, L. Yao, C. Liu, C. Qian, Z.D. Hood, X. Lin, W. Chen, T.E. Gage, I. Arslan, A. Travesset, K. Sun, N.A. Kotov, Q. Chen. Chiral Assemblies of Pinwheel Superlattices on Substrates. Nature, 2022. 
  4. Z. Ou, Z. Wang, B. Luo, E. Luijten, Q. Chen. Kinetic pathways of crystallization at the nanoscale. Nature Materials, 2020. 

Other Honors:

2025 Langmuir Lectureship, American Chemical Society
2024 Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award, Materials Research Society
2024 Provost’s Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2022 Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Polymer Scientist Award, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)
2018 Unilever Award, American Chemical Society
2018 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Chemistry, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
2018 CAREER Award, National Science Foundation
2017 Young Investigator Program Award, The Air Force Office of Scientific Research
2016 Forbes 30 under 30 Science List, Forbes Magazine

In the Media:

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