Lauren Zarzar
Nominators said Zarzar is unusual and stands out in terms of her scientific creativity and impactful contributions to the fundamental chemistry and materials science research communities. They said she has a passion for creativity and believes it is not an innate talent but rather a skill that needs to be constantly exercised and refined. She received the Faculty Scholar Medal for Physical Sciences.
One of Zarzar’s discoveries, published in Nature in 2019, is a novel way to use the properties of a material to generate structural colors.
“Zarzar showed that light with different paths of total internal reflection interfere to create color,” a nominator said. “What is stunning is that the effect occurs in structures with dimensions that are orders of magnitude larger than visible light wavelengths, so it was not intuitive that this mechanism should exist, and indeed, had likely been observed but ignored for a very long time.”
This approach showcased Zarzar’s creativity and inquisitive mind, nominators said. Chemists have long known glittery droplets change color with size but Zarzar set out to explain why.
“She realized that the phenomenon at play was not from periodicity, nor dispersion, nor diffraction, as one might expect,” a nominator said. “Rather, it was an optical interference effect, but this was not obvious from the outset because the typical droplet sizes are tens to hundreds of microns in diameter. To me, creativity is the ability to see and understand what others before have not, often in commonplace materials and phenomena — just like Dr. Zarzar has done here.”
Zarzar isn’t content to invent just in the lab, nominators said. She wants to see her work grow through innovations, technologies and inventions outside of the lab. She patented her structural color technology and earned funding through the NSF Partnerships for Innovation PFI program to pursue applied research aimed at manufacturing, scaling and commercializing the technology.
Zarzar is also innovating polymer films with structurally colored research. She and her team produced industrial scale ways of producing colored films and are exploring ways to commercialize the technology. She, along with a former graduate student, founded the company Chromatir Technologies LLC, which is seeking ways to introduce optical security features to prevent product counterfeiting and fraud.
“Clearly Dr. Zarzar has a passion and knack for both fundamental research and technology translation, which situates her well to have a career with long-lasting innovative impact,” a nominator said.
Another focus of Zarzar’s research is adaptive, responsive soft materials that give off chemical and mechanical signals. This approach can make more life-like materials and also has the potential for advances in the biomedical field and beyond. Her discovery, which she used to create Janus droplets, shows that different chemical compositions can become a source and a sink, communicating with one another.
Zarzar also researches laser-directed micropatterning, where she uses lasers to force nano-size chemical reactions. Nominators said the process opens the door for exciting advances in the creation, patterning and integration of nanomaterials. The process creates new materials not found in bulk form.
“The most interesting science is unexpected,” a nominator said. “Most scientists assume ideas have occurred to others and that certain applications have been done before. What sets Dr. Zarzar apart is that she has found ways to see the uncommon in the common and tackle difficult problems from different points of view.”