Drakopoulos with the Peter Debye Prize. Photo courtesy of Stavros X. Drakopoulos Written by Wright B. Señeres Oct. 24, 2024 The International Dielectric Society awarded Drakopoulos the Peter Debye Prize for Young Investigators for Excellence in Dielectric Research, which supports early-career scientists in the field. Drakopoulos studies the electrical properties of polymers, and their role in new materials for high-efficiency energy storage. He is a Princeton Materials Institute associate research scholar in the lab of polymer expert Rodney D. Priestley, the Pomeroy and Betty Perry Smith Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and dean of the Graduate School.The International Dielectric Society awards the Peter Debye Prize every two years to encourage and support young scientists pursuing research in dielectric spectroscopy, a method of studying how materials respond to electric fields. He received the award in September at the 12th Conference on Broadband Dielectric Spectroscopy in Lisbon, Portugal. The Debye Prize includes a cash award of €1,500.In 2023, Drakopoulos joined the Priestley lab after postdoctoral work as a Faraday Institution Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. He earned his B.Sc. in materials science from the University of Patras in Greece and his Ph.D. in materials engineering from Loughborough University in the U.K.