Research / Areas of ResearchPolymers and Soft Materials
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.
Faculty
Linda Broadbelt
Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Senior Associate Dean
The Broadbelt Lab is developing polyurethanes that can be recycled via simple thermal treatment or from which monomer can be recovered by solvolytic means.
Wesley Burghardt
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Engineering
The Burghardt lab seeks to understand the dynamics of complex fluids and polymers during flow.
Ella King
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering (beginning on September 1, 2026)
Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (beginning on September 1, 2026)
Sam Kriegman
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Jeffrey Lopez
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Polymeric materials for energy storage applications, charge transport in polymer membranes, reactions at electrochemical interfaces, automated experimentation
Tobin Marks
Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Catalytic Chemistry and Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Materials Science and Engineering
The Marks group has chemists and engineers working on waste polymer deconstruction and recycling, solar energy, and efficient hydrocarbon utilization.
Jeffrey Richards
Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
The Richards Laboratory studies the properties of soft materials and engineers them for applications including renewable energy storage and new sensors.
Krishna Shrinivas
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and (by courtesy) Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics and Cell and Developmental Biology
John Torkelson
Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering
The Torkelson group seeks to both understand molecular-scale behavior of polymers to engineer their properties by tuning molecular-scale responses via dynamic chemistry, nanoscale confinement, chain architecture, and novel solid-state processing, among other methods.
Danielle Tullman-Ercek
James N. and Nancy J. Farley Professor in Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Director, Master of Science in Biotechnology Program
Lisa Volpatti
Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Muzhou Wang
Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
The Wang Laboratory uses optics, synthesis, and high-throughput characterization to understand and design polymers for biomaterials and sustainability.
Courtesy
Richard Lueptow
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering
Senior Associate Dean
The Lueptow lab combines modeling, simulation, and experiments to study mixing in granular materials and transport processes in polymeric materials.
Chad Mirkin
George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering and Biomedical Engineering
Director, International Institute for Nanotechnology
The Mirkin lab uses spherical nucleic acids for the monitoring and manipulation of biological processes at the single-cell, tissue, and whole organism level.
Monica Olvera de la Cruz
Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering, Physics and Astronomy
Director, Center for Computation & Theory of Soft Materials
Deputy Director, Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science
Email Monica Olvera de la Cruz
The Olvera de la Cruz group develops models to study the self-assembly and structure of amphiphiles, copolymers, and synthetic and biological polyelectrolytes as well as segregation and interface adsorption in multicomponent complex fluids.
George Schatz
Professor of Chemistry and (by courtesy) Chemical and Biological Engineering
Schatz uses molecular dynamics and electronic structure theory methods to describe self-assembly of biopolymers, and polymer mechanical/structural properties.
Igal Szleifer
Christina Enroth-Cugell Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Professor of Chemistry
Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Professor of Medicine
The Szliefer group develops molecular models of biointerphases to gain fundamental understanding of the properties of complex molecular systems that encompass problems at the interface between medicine, biology, chemistry, physics and materials science.