Karl Waldemar Ziegler was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963, with Giulio Natta, for work on polymers. The Nobel Committee recognized his "excellent work on organometallic compounds [which]...led to new polymerization reactions and ... paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes". He is also known for his work involving free-radicals, many-membered rings, and organometallic compounds, as well as the development of Ziegler–Natta catalyst. One of many awards Ziegler received was the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1960 jointly with Otto Bayer and Walter Reppe, for expanding the scientific knowledge of and the technical development of new synthetic materials.
Alan Jay Heeger is an American physicist, academic and Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry.
Leo Philip Kadanoff was an American physicist. He was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and a former president of the American Physical Society (APS). He contributed to the fields of statistical physics, chaos theory, and theoretical condensed matter physics.
Polymer science or macromolecular science is a subfield of materials science concerned with polymers, primarily synthetic polymers such as plastics and elastomers. The field of polymer science includes researchers in multiple disciplines including chemistry, physics, and engineering.
Jacob Klein, is the Herman Mark Professor of Soft Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. He is well known for his work in soft condensed matter, polymer science and surface science.
Marshall Fixman was an American physical chemist, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Tobin Jay Marks is an inorganic chemistry Professor, the Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Catalytic Chemistry, Professor of Material Science and Engineering, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Professor of Applied Physics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Among the themes of his research are synthetic organo-f-element and early-transition metal organometallic chemistry, polymer chemistry, materials chemistry, homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, molecule-based photonic materials, superconductivity, metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, and biological aspects of transition metal chemistry.
Herman Francis Mark was an Austrian-American chemist regarded for his contributions to the development of polymer science. Mark's x-ray diffraction work on the molecular structure of fibers provided important evidence for the macromolecular theory of polymer structure. Together with Houwink he formulated an equation, now called the Mark–Houwink or Mark–Houwink–Sakurada equation, describing the dependence of the intrinsic viscosity of a polymer on its relative molecular mass. He was a long-time faculty at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. In 1946, he established the Journal of Polymer Science.
Harden M. McConnell was an American physical chemist. His many awards included the National Medal of Science and the Wolf Prize, and he was elected to the National Academy of Science."
JoAnne Stubbe is an American chemist best known for her work on ribonucleotide reductases, for which she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2017, she retired as a Professor of Chemistry and Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Ludwik Leibler, born in 1952 is a Polish-born French physicist. He is Professor of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.
Steven J. Sibener is a scientist at the University of Chicago who studies surface chemistry, physics, and materials research, as well as thin film polymer dynamics and AFM imaging studies of bacterial cell wall structure. He is also a Faculty member of the Center for Bright Beams.
Harvey Douglas Keith was a physicist and one of the primary polymer researchers over the latter half of the 20th century.
Richard B. Kaner is an American synthetic inorganic chemist. He is a distinguished professor and the Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Materials Innovation at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Department of Material Science and Engineering. Kaner conducts research on conductive polymers (polyaniline), superhard materials and carbon compounds, such as fullerenes and graphene.
Jack H. Freed is an American chemist known for his pioneering work in electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy. He is the Frank and Robert Laughlin Professor of Physical Chemistry, emeritus, at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Timothy P. Lodge is an American polymer scientist.
Steve Granick is an American scientist and educator. In 2023 he joined the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as the Robert Barrett Endowed Chair of Polymer Science and Engineering, with joint appointment in the Chemistry, Physics, and Chemical Engineering Departments after serving as director of the Institute for Basic Science Center for Soft and Living Matter, an interdisciplinary blue-sky research center in Ulsan, South Korea that pursues basic science research. Until 2015 he was professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Anna Christina Balazs is an American materials scientist and engineer. She currently is Distinguished Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and holds the John A. Swanson Chair at the Swanson School of Engineering.
James L. Skinner is an American theoretical chemist. He is the Joseph O. and Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder Professor Emeritus at the University Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Welch Foundation. Most recently, Skinner was the Crown Family Professor of Molecular Engineering, professor of chemistry, director of the Water Research Initiative and deputy dean for faculty affairs of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Skinner is recognized for his contributions to the fields of theoretical chemistry, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, linear and nonlinear spectroscopy of liquids, amorphous and crystalline solids, surfaces, proteins, and supercritical fluids. Skinner is the co-author of over 230 peer-reviewed research articles.
John Michael Jumper is an American senior research scientist at DeepMind Technologies. Jumper and his colleagues created AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequence with high accuracy. Jumper has stated that the AlphaFold team plans to release 100 million protein structures. The scientific journal Nature included Jumper as one of the ten "people who mattered" in science in their annual listing of Nature's 10 in 2021.
