The Colburn Award goes annually to a member of the Institute who has made significant contributions to the chemical engineering literature and who has received a Ph.D. within the past 12 years. AIChE first gave the award in 1945. Four other current Princeton CBE professors have won the Colburn award in the past.

Datta, who studies the dynamics of soft and living materials as they move in complex environments, has published a steady run of articles in high-impact journals over the past five years, including Science Advances, PNAS, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters and JACS. Through clever experimental design, especially the use of transparent hydrogel beads and other optically clear structures that mimic natural settings, his research has illuminated a wide range of phenomena and made an impact in several fields — the life sciences, drug design and delivery, environmental remediation, agriculture and industrial processes.

“Work from his lab in Princeton has already resulted in more than 40 publications that have revolutionized the fields of flow instabilities, swellable and shrinkable gels, and [spreading] of bacterial populations in complex porous media,” wrote Athanassios Panagiotopoulos, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, in a letter nominating Datta for the award. These and other publications have led Datta to garner more than 4,000 citations, with nearly 700 citations in 2022 alone.

Panagiotopoulos said Datta brought powerful tools and concepts from his background in physics and mathematics to classic problems in chemical engineering. Datta and his group have discovered new ways in which bacteria move, grow, and self-organize, both as individuals and collectives in these complex environments; outlined key dynamics in the flow of polymeric fluids through porous rocks; uncovered new dynamics in the way water-absorbant materials swell and shrink; and provided insights into the processes by which particulates, such as microplastic pollutants, spread through our environment. Datta’s group has also developed a technology called PoreBiome with the potential to aid the study and treatment of microbes in the gut, lungs and skin.

Before joining Princeton, Datta did his undergraduate work in math and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, earned a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard, and did postdoctoral research in chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. He has been named a Pew Biomedical Scholar, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and one of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ 35 Under 35. He has also won the American Chemical Society’s Unilever Award and the American Physical Society’s Biological Physics Early Career Award, among many others. Datta, who is currently the Department’s director of graduate studies, is an associated faculty member in the Princeton Bioengineering Initiative, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the High Meadows Environmental Institute and the Princeton Materials Institute. He was promoted to associate professor earlier this year.