On Dec. 2 at the 2015 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting, Professor Xuanhe Zhao was named the recipient of the 2015 Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award for a paper entitled, “Predicting fracture energies and crack-tip fields of soft tough materials”. Zhao’s paper presents a quantitative model that reveals the toughening mechanism of soft materials such as hydrogels and provides a rational foundation for the design of future soft tough materials. The EML Young Investigator Award is provided by academic publishing company Elsevier to honor the best paper by a young scientist and published in EML during the calendar years immediately preceding the year of the award. Read Zhao’s paper.