The 2024 Richard C. Tolman Award Recipient:
Professor Kenneth Shea
University of California, Irvine
Biography:
Kenneth Shea is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University and B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Toledo. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at California Institute of Technology.
Throughout his distinguished career, Professor Shea mentored more than 150 Ph.D. and post-doctoral students and involved more than 65 undergraduates in his research program. Professor Shea and his students have published over 350 manuscripts and presented 175 papers at scientific meetings and symposia. He has been awarded 11 U.S. patents and has given over 325 invited and plenary lectures at international symposia, academic and industrial institutions.
Professor Shea is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Zhejiang University and Beijing University of Chemical Technology. He has served on scientific advisory boards for several companies and is currently a consultant for Boston Scientific. He was a standing member of the External Review Committee at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, is on the editorial board of Biosensors and Bioelectronics and is past president of the Society of Molecular Imprinting.
His accolades include appointments as a DuPont Visiting Research Scientist, a Winston Churchill College Overseas Fellow at Cambridge University, an NIH Senior International Fellow, and a Sandia National Laboratories Visiting Scientist. Within the American Chemical Society, Professor Shea has been honored with the Cope Scholar Award and is a Science and Engineering Fellow of both the ACS Polymer Chemistry Division and the ACS Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Division.
The UCI Department of Chemistry honored Professor Shea for his achievement in receiving the SCALACS Tolman Award for outstanding contributions to chemistry at a Dinner Banquet on June 11, 2025 at The Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering (100 Academy Way, Irvine, CA 92617).
