Professor Rachel SEGALMAN

Rachel A. Segalman received her B.S. from the University of Texas at Austin and Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Universite Louis Pasteur before joining the faculty of UC Berkeley and faculty staff member of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories from 2004-2014. She also served as the Materials Science Division Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories from 2013-14. In the summer of 2014, she moved to UC Santa Barbara to be the Kramer Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials and became Department Chair of Chemical Engineering in 2015.   Segalman’s group works on controlling the structure and thermodynamics of functional polymers including polymerized ionic liquids and semiconducting and bioinspired polymers. This has led to a host of new and promising applications, particularly in plastic thermoelectrics.   Among other awards, Segalman received the 2015 Journal of Polymer Science Innovation Award, the 2012 Dillon Medal from the American Physical Society, the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar. She is also a Fellow of the Americal Physical Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society.