Learn more about the 2025 winners and their exceptional contributions to the field of environmental and sustainable chemistry.
The Editors of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, working in partnership with the ACS Green Chemistry Institute, are proud to announce the winners of the 2025 ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering Lectureship Award:
- Asia–Pacific: Dr. Hong Chen, Southern University of Science and Technology, China, honored for his innovative application of clean technologies, notably electrochemical and photochemically driven processes to address pollution control and circular processing of technical materials.
- Europe/Middle East/Africa: Dr. Athina Anastasaki, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland, honored for her pioneering contributions demonstrating low temperature radical depolymerization of vinyl polymers.
- The Americas: Dr. Milad Abolhasani, North Carolina State University, United States, honored for his pioneering work on "Self-Driving Labs"— integrating flow reactors, online reaction monitoring, and autonomous experimentation.
This annual award recognizes the research contributions of scientists, working in green chemistry, green engineering, and sustainability in the chemical enterprise, who have completed their academic training within the past 10 years. Lectureship award winners are selected for three regions: The Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia-Pacific. View the corresponding Editorial for more information about the award.
Read on to learn more about each of the three winners.
Dr. Hong Chen
Dr. Chen has a multidisciplinary background in environmental chemistry, environmental engineering, inorganic chemistry, materials chemistry, and applied physics. His main research interest is green energy-driven resource recovery and environmental pollution control. He received his doctoral degree in inorganic chemistry from the Department of Environmental and Material Chemistry at Stockholm University in 2014, working with Prof. Junliang Sun and Xiaodong Zou. He continued his postdoc training at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology with Prof. Licheng Sun, Stanford University with Prof. Michael F. Toney, and University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Peidong Yang. In September 2018, he joined the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), where he is now an associate professor at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering.
He has applied for more than 30 patents and published around 160 peer-reviewed papers with an h-index of 57 and more than 11200 Google Scholar citations. More than half of them were published in prestigious journals, including Nature Materials, Science Bulletin, Fundamental Research, PNAS, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Environmental Science & Technology, Inorganic Chemistry, Environmental Science & Technology Letters, ACS EST Engineering/Water, etc. He serves as an associate editor of Environmental Chemistry Letters; board member of Sustainable Horizons, Environmental Surfaces and Interfaces, and Environmental Functional Materials; and young editorial committee member of Fundamental Research, Chinese Chemical Letters, Chemical Engineering Journal Advances, Industrial Wastewater Treatment (in Chinese), and Engineering Science & Technology (in Chinese). He serves as a regular reviewer for more than 40 journals, including Nature and Nature Sub-journals.
Dr. Athina Anastasaki
Dr. Anastasaki was born and raised in Athens, Greece (with a very proud origin from Crete) and obtained her B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Athens. During her time as an undergraduate, she began research in polymer chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Marinos Pitsikalis, with whom she had her first publication. Thinking that publishing a paper was a good sign, she did her best to convince Prof. Dave Haddleton to accept her for a Ph.D. position at the University of Warwick, in the UK. Despite the tremendous weather difference between Greece and the UK (sunshine versus continuous rain), Dr. Anastasaki very much enjoyed her stay at Warwick and graduated in late 2014 with the Jon Weaver Award for the best Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry in the UK. In early 2015, she accepted a Monash-Warwick research fellow position between the Pharmaceutical department at Monash University and the University of Warwick, jointly supervised by Prof. Thomas Davis and Prof. Dave Haddleton. She then received an Elings Fellowship, followed by a Global Marie Curie Fellowship, to conduct research with Prof. Craig Hawker and return to the sun at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Anastasaki joined the Materials department of ETH in January 2019 as an Assistant Professor, and she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025.
Dr. Milad Abolhasani
Dr. Abolhasani is the ALCOA Professor and a University Faculty Scholar in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University, where he also serves as Director of the Graduate Program. Additionally, he leads as the Director of Accelerated Technologies for NC State’s pioneering Integrative Sciences Initiative, driving next-generation innovation in science and technology. Dr. Abolhasani holds a B.Sc. (2008) and M.A.Sc. (2010) in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology and the University of British Columbia, respectively, and earned his Ph.D. (2014) from the University of Toronto, with a cross-disciplinary focus encompassing Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Chemistry, and Chemical Engineering. Prior to joining NC State University in 2016, he was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT (2014-2016).
Dr. Abolhasani leads a dynamic and interdisciplinary research team dedicated to revolutionizing materials science and chemistry through the development of Self-Driving Fluidic Labs—autonomous robotic experimentation platforms for the accelerated discovery and scalable manufacturing of advanced functional materials and molecules.
A distinguished recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Abolhasani’s accolades include the NSF CAREER Award, the 2024 AIChE CRE Early Career Investigator Award, Machine Learning in Chemical Sciences & Engineering Award from The Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, 2022 AIChE NSEF Young Investigator Award, and recognition as one of the AIChE 35 Under 35 (2020). His groundbreaking contributions to chemical engineering and materials science have earned him recognition as an Influential Researcher (I&EC Research 2021), as well as the ACS-PRF Doctoral New Investigator Award, AIChE Futures Scholar, and The John C. Chen Young Professional Leadership Scholarship (AIChE). His work has been featured as an Emerging Investigator in leading journals including Nanoscale, Lab on a Chip, Reaction Chemistry & Engineering, Digital Discovery, and Journal of Flow Chemistry.
