Xi Chen, CCNY chemical engineer and 2023 NSF CAREER Award winner.
Xi Chen, the City College of New York chemical engineer whose pioneering research includes water-responsive materials, is the winner of a coveted National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. Recipients of this prestigious award are considered the best and brightest talents in the United States. Many of the winners later became world-famous scientists and Nobel laureates.
An assistant professor in The City College’s Grove School of Engineering, with affiliation to the Nanoscience Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC), Chen is widely regarded as a leader in hygroscopic materials and evaporation energy harvesting.
In fall 2020, the journal “Nature Materials” published an article entitled, “Mechanistic insights of evaporation-induced actuation in supramolecular crystals,” on a study led by Chen and his ASRC collaborators of shape-changing crystals that enable energy transfer from evaporation to mechanical motion. This could lead to harnessing evaporation as a source of energy or developing next generation actuators and artificial muscles for a broad array of applications.
Chen’s current research focuses on deciphering powerful and efficient evaporation-induced mechanical deformations in biological systems and replicating these mechanisms outside the biological context for evaporation-powered locomotion, green chemistry, and electricity generation. Visit the ChenLab to find out more about his work.
In addition to the NSF, Chen has been recognized by the Blavatnik National Awards, which honor America’s most innovative young scientists and engineers. He also serves as the World Economic Forum Expert in Future of Energy and Water.
Raised in China, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He then did a postdoc in biological sciences at Columbia University.
Chen is the seventh CCNY faculty to receive an NSF CAREER Award since 2018, and the second from the chemical engineering department over the same period after Robert Messinger.
About the City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. Education research organization Degree Choices ranks CCNY #1 nationally among universities for economic return on investment. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 15,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. This year, CCNY launched its most expansive fundraising campaign, ever. The campaign, titled “Doing Remarkable Things Together” seeks to bring the College’s Foundation to more than $1 billion in total assets in support of the College mission. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.