Chemical and Biological Engineering - Polymers and Soft Materials

Overview

Education

Students from the Chemical and Biological Engineering - Polymers and Soft Materials program at Northwestern University are trained to become leaders in research and development in industrial and university settings.

Soft materials and polymers are ubiquitous in our lives and form the basis of many advances in medicine, sustainability, manufacturing, and clean water access. What makes these materials unique is that their structure and dynamics span multiple length- and time- scales, and these microscopic characteristics can be engineered to control material properties. 

At Northwestern, researchers seek to discover and exploit these relationships to design materials that improve the performance of technologies that address important societal challenges including lowering the cost of renewable energy generation and storage, generating renewable fuels, circularizing the plastics economy, and creating the next-generation of high-performance composites.

Research Areas

Areas of emphasis for faculty in our department include controlling electronic and ionic transport, enhancing mechanical durability and reprocessability, enabling the next generation of soft robots and flexible electronics, and discovering new material properties and structure-property relationships. 

These efforts are informed by a deep expertise in synthesis, fabrication, and characterization techniques including small angle scattering, optical microscopy, electrochemical measurements, rheology and mechanics, and simulation.

At Northwestern, the soft matter and polymer research community is vibrant and includes faculty from diverse personal and academic backgrounds. The proximity to Argonne National Laboratory, our strong inter-departmental relationships, and the International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) make our department and Northwestern a hub for soft matter and polymer research world-wide.