The Materials Research Society has named University of Virginia professor Jerrold A. “Jerry” Floro the recipient of its 2026 MRS Impact Award , citing “significant MRS public outreach efforts as well as sustained, inclusive materials science education at the K-12, community college, undergraduate and graduate levels.” Floro accepted the award April 30 at the 2026 MRS Spring Meeting and Exhibit in Honolulu.
“I’m very honored by this recognition,” said Floro, who’s been involved with the society since he was a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I love my discipline!” he said. “The idea that all things technological must depend on materials in order to function means that materials are enablers, and so materials scientists can be at the forefront of enabling major advances in new technologies. If I can get students and laypeople to appreciate this, it’s a been a happy day.”
For Floro, this is not just academic, it is an opportunity to live the school’s mission of engineering for the greater good.
As founding chair of the society’s Public Outreach Committee in 2005 Floro was integral in securing National Science Foundation funding for the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network, a multi-institutional collaboration to educate the public about nanotechnology.
This network produced several projects, including “ Making Stuff ,” a PBS “NOVA” series seen by millions in 2011. Another program, NanoDays, created demonstration kits and programming used in hundreds of elementary school classrooms across the country every year for a decade. Millions more participated in museum exhibitions across the country.
“MRS is the premier materials science technical society, and to be recognized as making an impact by this society is a huge deal,” said Elizabeth Opila , chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Jerry’s efforts highlighted the importance of materials science across the nation through the PBS show, and internationally through the worldwide MRS membership.”
And that doesn’t touch on Floro’s influence as a UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty member, his contributions to his own department, or his impact in his local community.
While NanoDays has ended nationally, Floro and his UVA students still bring the events to local schools.
Last summer he launched a materials science camp for high school science teachers, hosting 19 educators. The program is on pace to fill all 20 slots this year.
“This teacher education effort is a multiplier to reach high school students on the impact of materials science, thereby recruiting the next generation of materials professionals,” Opila said.
At UVA, Floro has assumed several leadership roles in his department. Among them, he helped establish and now directs the undergraduate program, including its ABET accreditation. Initiated in 2021, this program added the Bachelor of Science to the department’s degree offerings for the first time since materials science and engineering was established as a graduate program at UVA in 1962.
He is also the department’s associate chair of academics.
As co-principal investigator with associate professor David L. Green, Floro brought an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program in Advanced Materials Synthesis to UVA. Over the summers of 2022 to 2024, 35 REU interns — two-thirds of them recruited from community college partners — participated.
The goal was to cement their interests in transferring to a four-year school for a STEM degree, Floro explained, and 19 of 23 community college students did exactly that.
“I believe the REU played a significant role in helping them decide on educational directions and giving them additional preparation for their transfer experience,” he said.
Floro has designed or redesigned several courses — including Introduction to Materials Science, which serves undergraduate students across UVA Engineering. He designed a required lab for MSE’s bachelor’s program about which one student wrote, “Professor Floro amplified my excitement about all branches of materials science/engineering.”
Nicolas “Nico” Fonseca Alva, a transfer student who graduated last year and is now studying for his Ph.D., was Floro’s research and teaching assistant and helped with NanoDays events. He said Floro’s teaching was always the same.
“He emphasized comprehension and intuition over memorization and checking off steps,” Fonseca Alva said.
In the classroom, Fonseca Alva said, Floro guided students to the answer rather than tell them and in the lab they learned to carefully probe their assumptions and process.
“I credit his mentorship and his emphasis on an intuitive and meticulous approach to science for many of my successes,” Fonseca Alva said.
Floro is an avid researcher focusing on understanding how materials behave at the nanoscale. Nanotechnology works on the phenomenon that when you dice up a substance small enough, it acquires different physical properties that can be tailored to make new materials with new functions.
“Making a new discovery is an unparalleled sense of accomplishment,” said Floro, who caught the materials science bug while working at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. That led him to MIT and, after more than a decade at Sandia National Laboratory and several such discoveries, to Charlottesville.
At UVA he’s found an outlet for his love of research and teaching rolled into one.
“I’m most proud of seeing my mentees, either Ph.D. or B.S. grads, go out into the world and thrive,” he said. “That’s a legacy that truly means something.”