2026 ACS Global Outstanding Mentor in Polymer Science and Engineering

CME PMSE USA Team Winners: University of Michigan – David Kitto (Student) and Jovan Kamcev (Mentor)

Bio: Jovan Kamcev is Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Macromolecular Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan, leading efforts in next-generation polymeric membranes and sorbents for sustainable water treatment, energy storage, and ion separations. He earned his B.E. in Chemical & Molecular Engineering/Applied Math & Statistics from Stony Brook University (2012), M.S.E. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (2016), and completed postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley (2017–2019). His high-impact contributions include modeling ion sorption and trade-offs in membranes, elucidating fundamental transport phenomena, and synthesis of new membranes. Honors include the DOE Early Career Research Award (2021), NSF CAREER Award (2023), AIChE 35 Under 35 Award (2023), ACS PMSE Young Investigator Award (2024), NAMS Young Membrane Scientist Award (2021), and University of Michigan ChE Outstanding Faculty Award (2025). His h-index is approximately 35 (Google Scholar, with >7,000 citations).

2026 CME NASA Symposium Abstract – Specific ion effects on ion transport in charged polymer membranes

Selective separation of like-charged ions is a central challenge in applications such as critical mineral recovery. Electrochemical membrane-based separations offer promising pathways to address this need, but there is lack of membranes with sufficient ion selectivity. The development of highly selective membranes would benefit from improved fundamental understanding of ion transport in charged polymer membranes. Notably, such materials often exhibit specific ion effects (SIEs), which are differences in properties that cannot be explained by treating ions as point charges. Although these effects could be leveraged to design more selective membranes, their origins remain poorly understood. This study elucidates the role of SIEs in ion transport through charged polymer membranes by integrating experimental measurements of ion mobility and in situ ion/ion and ion/water interactions in model charged polymer membranes with results from molecular dynamics simulations on analogous systems. We demonstrate that solvent-mediated ion interactions drive pronounced SIEs within the studied membranes, with the ion softness, i.e., the malleability of ion hydration shells, from Hard/Soft Acid/Base (HSAB) theory emerging as a key predictor of transport properties. HSAB theory also explains the observed mechanism of solvent-mediated ion interactions. Our findings offer a mechanistic framework for designing membranes with tailored ion selectivity, potentially enabling efficient separations of chemically similar ions.

David Kitto1, Gregory Reimonn2, Riley Vickers1, Carolina Espinoza1, Aeva G. Silverman1, Bryan Goldsmith1, Jovan Kamcev1,2*
1Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
2Macromolecular Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
*jkamcev@umich.edu