Richard S. Stein to Receive 1999 Von Hippel Award for Contributions to the Science of Polymers
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Richard S. Stein to Receive 1999 Von Hippel Award for Contributions to the Science of Polymers The Materials Research Society's highest honor, the Von Hippel Award, this year will be given to Richard S. Stein of the University of Massachusetts—Amherst in "recognition of his seminal work in the development of rheo-optical techniques for polymer characterization and property assessment, his profound contributions leading to a fundamental understanding of how polymeric materials respond to deformation in the melt and solid states, and his pioneering role in the development of graduate education in polymer materials." The Von Hippel Award is given annually to an individual in recognition of outstanding contributions to interdisciplinary research on materials. Stein has dedicated about 50 years of research on how polymer materials orient, crystallize, and deform. He originated the field of rheo-optics which encompasses simultaneous real-time measurement of optical properties and polymer melt rheology. Through the rheo-optical approach, Stein used various optical techniques, including both small angle neutron x-ray scattering and light scattering, wide-angle x-ray diffraction, birefringence, and infrared dichroism. He used these optical methods to probe the spatial and orientational ordering in semicrystalline polymers and polymer blends, and particularly the changes in the structure under anelastic and plastic deformation. During his college days, from undergraduate to postdoctoral studies, Stein constructed one of the first apparatus for the study of the angular dependence of light scattering from a polymer solution and made one of the first measurements of the radius of gyration of a polymer molecule (cellulose acetate). He demonstrated how to combine measurements of birefringence and x-ray diffraction to obtain quantitative measurements on the orientation of the crystalline and of the amorphous regions of polyethylene. He designed and constructed one of the first x-ray diffractometers capable of in situ polymer information studies. He showed the effect of the crystalline field in causing splitting of the infrared bands of polyethylene crystals and demonstrated how these could be used to determine both the degree of crystallinity and a quantitative measurement of the extent of molecular and crystal orientation. His methods are now widely used in industrial and academic laboratories, plus many of the principles and methods he developed are now applied to the interdisciplinary field of complex fluids. His light MRS BULLETIN/OCTOBER 1999
Richard S. Stein scattering theories for solid-state polymers, furthermore, apply to other materials such as liquid crystals and rubber composites. In a series of papers published in the early 1960s in the Journal of Applied Physics, Stein established the fundamental equations of H v and Vv scattering of polarized light from polymer spherulites and demonstrated quantitative agreement with experiments. When neutron scattering became available in the early 1970s, Stein was among the first
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