Chad M. Rienstra, PhD, is an expert in biological solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a method that provides atomic-resolution structural information for insoluble aggregates, such as fibrils, as well as membrane proteins and nanocrystals. He earned his BA (chemistry and mathematics, 1993) at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and PhD (chemistry) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow. He was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University in New York, NY.

Dr. Rienstra established his laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002, where he is a professor of chemistry and centennial scholar. Some of his notable awards include the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Research Corporation Innovation and Cottrell Scholars Awards, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and the Founders