Chad A. Mirkin has been named the recipient of the 2027 Priestley Medal, the American Chemical Society’s highest honor. (The ACS publishes C&EN.) Mirkin is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Medicine, Materials Science & Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Chemical & Biological Engineering at Northwestern University and director of Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology.
The prize is the latest in a long list of accolades Mirkin has received—most recently the Willard Gibbs Medal and the 2024 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience—but he says it holds special significance. “Think of the people that have won in the past. These are not only people who have distinguished themselves over often lifetimes of contributions but have moved the field beyond chemistry.”
“The people you influence, the people you train, they are your DNA. They carry a lot of your values, your eye towards excellence, and creativity forward way beyond your time and footprint in this world.”
The honor is “well deserved and well earned,” says Christopher Chang, a professor of bioorganic chemistry at Princeton University. “He’s had a huge impact on many fields of chemistry.” Chang says Mirkin has a unique ability to synthesize different areas of fundamental chemistry, see connections, “and then forge new directions from that combination of classical fields and create something new.”
The award recognizes Mirkin’s contributions to the field of nanochemistry, for translating discoveries to real-world applications through entrepreneurship, and for his impacts on the chemistry profession through education and policy, according to an ACS release about the news.
Mirkin has discovered innovative ways to design, make, and apply nanomaterials—advances that have resulted in novel classes of materials with wide-ranging applications. He is renowned for inventing spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), which are globular nanostructures composed of DNA and RNA radiating from a nanoparticle core. SNAs now form the basis of over 1,800 commercial products and have transformed medical diagnostics and therapies.
He has also pioneered advanced manufacturing methods such as dip-pen nanolithography, which makes it possible to write sub-100 nm resolution patterns over large areas, and 3D high-area rapid printing technology, which can quickly create large structures. These methods now form the basis of advances in electronics, energy, and materials discovery.
The diverse technologies developed in Mirkin’s lab branch from “the same tree trunk, the question of ‘how do we program materials to do something at the nanoscale?’,” says Adrian Figg, a chemistry professor at Virginia Tech and a C&EN 2026 Talented 12 honoree, who did his postdoc with Mirkin. “One of the most impressive things about him is . . . his sharp understanding of the science and being able to ask really deep questions.”
Beyond academia, Mirkin served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under President Barack Obama and has founded 11 startups. These include Azul 3D, maker of high-area rapid 3D printers that are used to make everything from semiconductor chips to eyeglass lenses; Flashpoint Therapeutics, which develops cancer immunotherapeutics based on SNAs; and TERA-print and MattIQ, which are harnessing massively parallel tip-based synthesis and AI to accelerate the discovery of materials for clean energy, catalysis, and other applications.
Mirkin’s entrepreneurial spirit is “one of the really great things about having him as a mentor,” says Cassandra Callmann, a chemistry professor and cancer researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who was a postdoc in Mirkin’s lab from 2018 to 2021. “We were trained by him in thinking from more of a translational side.” Mirkin gives his students direction and freedom simultaneously, she says, is always there when you need help, and while his group is large—typically 50 to 70 members—“it runs like a well-oiled machine. If I could go back and do it all again and pick a postdoc adviser, I would choose him every single time.”
And it is the hundreds of students and researchers that Mirkin has taught and mentored that Mirkin says is his proudest accomplishment. “The people you influence, the people you train, they are your DNA,” he says. “They carry a lot of your values, your eye towards excellence, and creativity forward way beyond your time and footprint in this world.”
