The 2026 Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Scientist Award, presented at MACRO 2026, has been awarded to Yinyin Bao.
The Hanwha-TotalEnergies IUPAC Young Scientist Award (formerly Samsung-Total Petrochemicals – IUPAC Young Scientists Award) is dedicated to outstanding young scientists (not older than 40 years) and is sponsored by a grant from the aforementioned company. The prize was first awarded on the occasion of MACRO 2004 (Paris) and is granted biennially on the occasion of the IUPAC World Polymer Congress. The awardees are selected from the nominees by a Committee of the IUPAC Polymer Division. The 2026 award was presented at Macro2026 in Kuching, Malaysia, to Professor Yinyin Bao.
Professor Yinyin Bao was honored with this award for his research on functional synthetic polymers as 3D printing biomaterials and light-emitting materials, and their applications in personalized medicine and advanced optoelectronics. Prof. Bao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Helsinki, and he also holds a Senior Guest Scientist position in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich. He is particularly interested in developing biodegradable photopolymers for light-based 3D printing of elastomers and hydrogels, as well as in synthesizing sustainable light-emitting polymers by controlled polymerization methods.
ORCID 0000-0001-5264-1211
> See also the announcement prepared by the conference organizers on LinkedIn.
Former awardees include Lutz Nuhn and Rongrong Hu (2024), Qian Chen and Eric Appel (2022), Athina Anastasaki and Changle Chen (2020), Andreas Walther (2018), and to Moon Jeong Park and Brent Sumerlin (2016).