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Associate Professor Michael Shirts is the recipient of the 2020 . This is an annual award given out by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers that recognizes mid-career researchers working in computational molecular science and engineering across academia, industry or government.

“I’m very honored to receive the award,” Shirts said. “It’s immensely gratifying when research you do is actually useful to other people in their own pursuit of knowledge and technological applications.”

Shirts will formally receive the award during the virtual in November. He will also deliver an invited talk at the CoMSEF plenary session on his efforts to make molecular modeling as useful as possible in chemical engineering research and how others can work toward this end.

Glenn L. Murphy Endowed Professor Daniel Schwartz prepared the nomination for this prestigious award.

“It recognizes one person each year within the chemical engineering community whose research using computational simulations has had extraordinarily high impact in the first phase of their independent career,” Schwartz said. “The list of previous winners of this award is essentially a who’s who of the top researchers in computational molecular engineering, and we are incredibly excited to have Michael join this select group.”

This award comes as an acknowledgement of Shirts’ highly cited research in the field among his peers and established researchers alike.

“When I reached out to senior researchers in his field to ask them to participate in the nomination process, they were all intimately familiar with his research and eager to help,” Schwartz said. “Michael has not only developed important novel and rigorous computational methods and used those methods to solve important engineering problems in protein structure and drug discovery, but he has also been extremely active in making his novel methods readily available for other researchers to use.”

Shirts credited the support of his fellow researchers and the graduate students within his lab for this award.

“My original training was in chemistry, so I’ve gotten a lot of support from many, many researchers within the chemical engineering community as I transitioned myself to work on chemical engineering problems starting as an independent researcher,” Shirts said.

“I would also like to acknowledge the past and current graduate students and postdocs in my group who do much of the research, and colleagues in the department who have made it a welcoming environment since I moved to CU five years ago!”

CoMSEF Impact Award winners receive a plaque commemorating their accomplishment and an honorarium. The AIChE 2020 Annual Meeting will be held online Nov. 16-20.