Beckman Institute faculty member John Rogers has received another prestigious honor, earning the 2007 Baekeland Award from the North Jersey Section of the American Chemical Society.

The award has been given for the past 63 years on a biennial basis to an American chemist under the age of 40 years for what the group says are "accomplishments in pure or industrial chemistry, as characterized by the initiative, creativeness, leadership, and perseverance of the individual and indicated by published or unpublished evidence."

The Baekeland Award is just the latest in a string of honors for Rogers in the past year. He was also selected this past fall as a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in the spring was named as the winner of the Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award by Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society.

Rogers is a member of the 3-D Micro and Nanosystems group at Beckman, and a Founder Professor of Engineering, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois.

The Baekeland Award is sponsored by the Union Carbide Corporation and consists of a gold plated medal and a $5000 cash award. The award was established to commemorate the technical and industrial achievements of chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland, the inventor of one of the first polymeric synthetics that helped to introduce plastics to the world, and to encourage younger chemists to emulate his example. Past winners include John Hartwig, formerly of Yale and now at Illinois, and Charles M. Lieber of Harvard.