Brown Professor Robert Hurt was named among three new Fellows of the American Carbon Society at last week’s Carbon2026 conference in South Carolina. A former Charles E. Pettinos Award winner from the same organization, he is known for his work on graphene self-assembly and new carbon
architectures.
Hurt’s research focuses on carbon-based materials and their applications and implications for human health and the environment. His laboratory’s current thrust is the creation of new graphene-based material architectures from the casting or printing of graphene colloidal inks. This route allows control of graphene nanosheet assembly to fabricate protective barrier films for wearable applications, sorbents for toxic chemical detection and sequestration, electrodes and interlayers for lithium batteries, and controlled-release antibacterial coatings for medical devices.
He received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1987 and, before joining Brown, held positions in the Central Research and Development Division of Bayer AG in Leverkusen, Germany, and at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. He served as Director of the NIH-supported Superfund Research Program Center at Brown, and is on the editorial advisory board of the Royal Society Journal Environmental Science Nano. He was named the 2017 Graphene Award of the Year winner at the European Advanced Materials Congress. From 2013-2018, Hurt was Editor-in-Chief of the materials science and nanotechnology journal CARBON. He was Technical Program Chair for the international conference, Carbon2004, and that same year received the Graffin Lecture Award of the American Carbon Society. Hurt also received the Silver Medal of the Combustion Institute in Naples, Italy in 1996 and an NSF CAREER Award, also in 1996.