Rachel Segalman - 2020 Honoree to the Academy of Distinguished Chemical Engineers - McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering - The University of Texas at Austin - Recognized as an academic leader and polymers expert.
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 in 2004 where she was recently the acting division director for materials sciences at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories.
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. Dr. Segalman’s group works on controlling the structure and thermodynamics of functional polymers including semiconducting and bioinspired polymers. This has led to a host of new and promising applications, particularly in plastic thermoelectrics.
Among other awards, Dr. Segalman received the 2015 Journal of Polymer Science Innovation Award, the 2012 Dillon Medal from the American Physical Society, she is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar, and in 2019 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.