Prof. Chaudhury is 2005 winner of major adhesion research award

Manoj Chaudhury, the Franklin J. Howes Jr. Distinguished Professor of chemical engineering, has been chosen to receive the 2005 Award for Excellence in Adhesion Science from the Adhesion Society.

The award, which is sponsored by 3M, is the Adhesion Society's premier award for outstanding achievements in scientific research relating to adhesion.

Chaudhury will receive the award at the 28th annual meeting of the Adhesion Society in February in Mobile, Alabama. A symposium will be held in his honor on Feb. 13.

The award is given for an internationally recognized scientific contribution that has improved society's understanding of adhesion, or for a contribution to the technology of adhesion or adhesives that has had a major impact on industry. The citation of his award reads "for exceptional creativity and ingenuity in research on adhesion and wetting and the development of simple methods to measure the strength of attraction between materials."

Chaudhury has published more than 80 peer reviewed papers in leading scientific journals including Science, Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of The Royal Society (London), Physical Review Letters and an invited commentary in Nature.  He also holds several patents.

"Prof. Chaudhury has been most influential in steering the adhesion science community into thinking about and testing adhesion phenomena in new and unique ways," says the Adhesion Society's award announcement.

The Adhesion Society specifically cited Chaudhury for:

* "Helping to develop methods based on contact mechanics to investigate the intermolecular attractive forces that form the basis for adhesion.

* "Generating theories of van der Waals interactions and examining contact angle methods to infer surface energetics. "In particular, his polar and apolar component of surface energy description generated a lot of interest and follow-up examination."

*  "Groundbreaking work on surfaces with gradient surface tension".

* "Seminal work on the surface energetics of silicone elastomers."

* Extending his research into the "surface energetics and mechanics of release of pressure-sensitive adhesives and into the durability of aerospace structural adhesive bonds."

Previous recipients of the annual award, which has been given since 1987, include Professors A. N. Gent, K. L. Johnson, K. Kendall, P. G. de Gennes and the late Frederick M. Fowkes, professor of chemistry at Lehigh, who was honored in 1989 for "fundamental understanding of and contributions to interfacial phenomena with particular reference to adhesion science."