About the Speaker's

Karen Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Strathclyde. Her research expertise is in multiscale modelling of materials and interfaces, and she is particularly interested in polymer crystallisation and heterogeneous nucleation from solution.  She is Principal Investigator on one of ten awarded UKRI Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging projects (NE/V010603/1) “Biocomposite Design for Food Packaging”, and a Leverhulme Trust Research Programme Grant (2019-RPG-197) “Catching Nucleation in Action using Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy”.

Alamgir Karim is Dow Chair Professor and Director of Materials Program at the University of Houston in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department. He is Fellows of the American Physical Society (APS), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA). He has published about 280 papers, and his current research is on fundamental studies of directed assembly of polymer thin films for solid state and flexible energy storage and sustainable membrane applications.

Matsen obtained his BSc in Mathematical Physics at Simon Fraser University in 1987 and his PhD in Physics at the University of Guelph in 1991. During his PhD, he investigated bicontinuous microemulsions in mixtures of water, oil and surfactant, under the supervision of Don Sullivan. He then moved to University of Washington to continue this line of research under the supervision of Michael Schick. There he started to explore polymeric models and in doing so developed an efficient computational method to solve the self-consistent field theory of Sam Edwards for complex block copolymer morphologies. His success landed him a second postdoc position at the University of Minnesota with Frank Bates, the leading experimental group in block copolymer research. In 1996, he was then hired as a Lecturer in the Polymer Physics Group at the University of Reading. He continued his development and application of SCFT, rising through the ranks to Reader (2000) and Professor (2005). He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2008 for “seminal contributions to the development and implementation of the self-consistent field theory for block-copolymer materials and polymeric brushes.” In 2013, he took up a University Research Chair position at the University of Waterloo. During his time there, his research has become increasingly focused on the development and application of a novel simulation technique known as field-theoretic simulations.

Matthew Tirrell is the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, where he was the Founding Dean from 2011-23. He is also senior advisor and senior scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, where he served as Deputy Laboratory Director for Science at Argonne from 2015-2018, and from 2022-23. Tirrell's work is in self-assembly and interfacial phenomena in polymers. This work has uncovered new physics of phase transitions and led to development of new materials, most recently, based on polyelectrolyte complexation. Tirrell’s laboratory designs and synthesizes self-assembling molecules that organize into multifunctional, multivalent micelles with targeting, image contrast and therapeutic capabilities. Recent areas of concentration have been on complexes that target vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque, that disrupt intracellular protein-protein interactions, and that package nucleic acids for targeted and efficient delivery. Tirrell’s work has been recognized with the American Physical Society’s Polymer Physics Prize, the American Chemical Society’s Colloid Chemistry Award, the Colburn, Stine, Professional Progress, and Walker Awards of AIChE, as well as by election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering.