Modesto T. López has been awarded the Andrew Keller Award for Best European Paper in POLYMERS 2021
Modesto T. López López has recently been awarded the “Andrew Keller Award for Best European Paper in POLYMER in 2021” thanks to the work “Composite polymer hydrogels with high and reversible elongation under magnetic stimuli”. This award recognizes high-quality and high-impact papers published in Polymer. The awards are selected based on scholarly merits by an Award Committee consisting of European members of the Editorial Board.
Although the field of soft actuators is dominated by elastomers that undergo mechanical deformations in response to external stimuli, in recent years research interests are being redirected towards hydrogels, with the aim of overcoming the limitations of elastomers. In their work, Modesto and his co-authors (Francisco J. Vázquez Pérez, Cristina Gila Vílchez, Juan D.G. Durán, Andrey Zubarev, Luis Álvarez de Cienfuegos, and Laura Rodríguez Arco) demonstrate that the combination of a physical polymer hydrogel with a dispersed phase consisting of clusters of magnetic particles, results in magnetic hydrogel composites that exhibit high and reversible elongation in response to magnetic stimuli. They show that this response strongly depends on the elasticity of the matrix, the concentration of magnetic particles and the distribution of the particles within the network of polymer nanofibres (Vazquez-Perez et al., 2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2021.124093.
