Angel Martí elected fellow of the American Chemical Society

By Jade Boyd
Special to Rice News

Rice University’s Angel Martí has been elected a fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS), one of his discipline’s highest honors.

Martí, professor and department chair of chemistry, is among 37 newly elected fellows announced by ACS this week. With more than 200,000 members in 140 countries, ACS is one of the largest scientific organizations. Fewer than 1% of its members are fellows, a distinction reserved for those with exemplary records of both service to the society and outstanding scientific or professional achievement.

Martí joined Rice’s Wiess School of Natural Sciences in 2008 and holds joint appointments in bioengineering and materials science and nanoengineering. His research group has designed and synthesized molecular tags to investigate amyloid structures implicated in Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, and he won a $1.8 million National Institutes of Health grant in March to study those structures in unprecedented detail. His lab has also developed tools and methods to purify, modify, produce and study boron nitride nanoparticles and created an efficient method to produce fluorescent surfactants used in medicine and manufacturing.

In 2024, Martí was elected chair of ACS’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry. He is currently serving a one-year term as chair-elect and will serve as chair in 2025 and past-chair in 2026. He served as the division’s secretary, also an elected role, from 2021-23, and also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of the American Chemical Society , one of the field’s most prestigious and highly ranked journals.

Martí is a recipient of Rice’s Presidential Mentoring Award, the university’s highest recognition for mentoring graduate and undergraduate students, and he serves as faculty director of the Rice Emerging Scholars Program, an innovative, residential academic program that helps first-year students prepare for the challenging pace, depth and rigor of Rice’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula.

Martí and the other 2024 ACS fellows will be formally recognized at the society’s ACS Fall 2024 meeting in Denver Aug 18-22.