Rigoberto Advincula, the UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair of Advanced and Nanostructured Materials and a joint professor in UT’s Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and ORNL, will be a scheduled speaker for national and international audiences at two upcoming events.

Advincula will be speaking at the Society of Plastics Engineers International Polyolefins Conference and at a virtual webinar for the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

The webinar on January 16th includes authors who wrote articles for BRIDGE, an NAE journal, for the Fall 2025 issue dedicated to AI/ML and the Materials Genome Initiative. UT Materials Science Weston Fulton Professor Sergei Kalinin is also a speaker on the webinar.

Advincula will discuss new frontiers in AI/ML-driven polymer research, as well as the importance of self-driving laboratories (SDLs). The “NAE webinar is timely, given the high interest in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission”, Advincula said.

In February, Advincula will be a plenary speaker for the 2026 SPE International Polyolefins Conference in Galveston, Texas. He is one of four plenary speakers at the conference, which is expected to draw nearly 1,000 participants in person or virtually. The international meeting is an important annual event for the plastics and polyolefins community. The discussions by the plenary speakers will be live streamed to a worldwide audience, both within industry and academia.

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)