Having earned his B.S. in chemical engineering from National Taiwan University, Benjamin S. Hsiao arrived at the University of Connecticut in 1982 in pursuit of his Ph.D. Under the guidance of Professors Ed Samulski and Montgomery Shaw, Hsiao completed his Materials Science Ph.D. in 1987. He has since built a exceptional reputation and stellar career which the IMS Polymer Program recognized by naming him a Distinguished Alumni. On April 24, 2024, Dr. Hsaio returned to Storrs to deliver a presentation for the program’s Distinguished Alumni Seminar.
Dr. Hsaio completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Massachusetts with a dual focus on chemistry as well as polymer science and engineering. He spent eight years refining his research skills with DuPont before returning to academia as an assistant professor of chemistry at Stony Brook University where his accomplishments include 470 published papers, 40 patents, and the mentorship of 37 doctoral students. Stony Brook University recognized him with the prestigious title, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. Additional accomplishments include serving as the Co-founding Director of the Innovative Global Energy Solutions Center and the Director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Integrated Electric Energy Systems at Stony Brook University. A complete biography can be found at: https://www.hsiaoglobal.org/benjamin-s-hsiao.
Dr. Hsiao’s distinguished alumni presentation, From Nanocellulose Technologies to New Circular Solutions for Agriculture, explained his innovative approach to repurposing agricultural waste for the creation of polymer products, .
The reunion of Dr. Hsiao with Prof. Robert Weiss and co-advisor Prof. Montgomery Shaw was joyous and the entire department was eager to meet the esteemed alumni.
In a collaborative effort, researchers from the University of Connecticut (led by Profs. Yao Lin, VJ Kumar and Xudong Yao) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (led by Prof. Jianjun Cheng) have made an advance in the rational design of synthetic polypeptides to develop filament-based hydrogels. The work, conceptualized and realized by the graduate students Tianjian Yang (UConn) and Tianrui Xue (UIUC), has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) and featured as the cover of the March 6 issue.
Professors Greg A. Sotzing and Pritish S. Aklujkar have been working with high temperature dielectrics used in high energy density capacitors. They are developing a new generation of all-organic polymer dielectric capacitors that can withstand high temperature conditions, eliminating the need for coolant systems. These capacitors will have a number of applications, including electric-vehicle charging stations and Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch Systems (EMALS) used to catapult jets from aircraft carriers. Their paper, “Chromogenic Identification of Breakdown” was published in Nature Materials, February, 2, 2024. Visit 
