Synthetic and natural polymers which play an essential and ubiquitous role in everyday life have seen the dawn of a new era in recent years, due to the ability to tune their functionality for use in a wide range of electronic applications, their formability and recyclability permitting use for a multitude of structural applications, and their inert response necessary for use in the health and medical industry.

We have one of the largest polymer research portfolios amongst MSE programs in the US, with strengths in topologically-complex, functional, nanostructured, and shape-memory and bio-polymers, conjugated oligomers, supra-molecular and block-copolymers, as well as negative Poisson’s ratio polymers and nematic liquid crystals. Faculty research in polymers is focused on all aspects of synthesis, processing, recycling, characterizing, testing, modeling and computing, for advancing the understanding of process/structure/property relations needed for performance-specific design with polymers.

The faculty listed below, have identified Polymers as one of their primary research areas based on material form.