Emily Pentzer, Editor-in-Chief
Texas A&M University, USA
ORCID: 0000-0001-6187-6135
Emily Pentzer is an Associate Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Her research centres on developing new polymeric materials and assemblies as a route to understanding structure-property-application relationships and access functions not possible with current state-of-the-art systems. Her group works on the encapsulation of “active” liquids and gases, designing and synthesizing new polymer chemistries, and developing feedstocks for additive manufacturing to produce multifunctional materials. She received a Young Investigator Award from the Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE) Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 2017, the Rising Star Award in 2019 from the ACS Women’s Chemist Committee, and the Faculty Diversity Excellence Award from Case Western Reserve University in 2019. She was named a Texas A&M Presidential Impact Fellow in 2021 and a finalist for the Blavatnik Award in physical sciences and engineering in 2022. She has served as an Associate Editor for Polymer Chemistry since 2015.
Rachel Auzély-Velty, Associate Editor
University Grenoble Alpes, France
ORCID: 0000-0003-2038-7604
Rachel Auzély-Velty is full Professor at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA). She is leading the group “Structure and Modification of Polysaccharides” in CERMAV-CNRS (Grenoble) where she was recruited as a CNRS researcher in 1999 before being promoted to full Professor at UGA in 2005. Her research interests lie in the fields of chemistry and physico-chemistry of polysaccharides and of biomaterials (especially hydrogels). Potential target applications include controlled and targeted drug delivery, cell therapy and tissue engineering. She has published more than 110 papers related to polysaccharide chemistry in international journals, 6 book chapters, and 14 patents. She was a junior fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) (2009-14) and she is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Biomacromolecules (ACS) and Carbohydrate Polymers (Elsevier).
Pengfei Cao, Associate Editor
Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China
ORCID: 0000-0003-2391-1838
Pengfei Cao is a full Materials Science and Engineering professor at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT, China). After his Ph.D. in the Macro department at Case Western Reserve University, USA, Cao moved to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, USA) and had been a staff scientist since 2019. He has also served on the Editorial Board of Supramolecular Materials, Macromolecules, and MRS Communications. Pengfei has also been awarded the R&D 100 Award of 2021, the ACS-PMSE Young-Investigator Award of 2021 and the ACS Rising Star in Materials Science of 2023.
Pengfei leads the research group of Energy-Applied Elastomers. His current research interests are synthetic elastic polymers for energy-related applications, including functional elastomers (e.g., recyclable, self-healing, impact-resistant or adhesive elastomers) and energy-storage applications (e.g., polymer electrolytes/binders and polymeric protective layers).
Peter Wich, Associate Editor
University of New South Wales, Australia
ORCID: 0000-0003-1522-0340
Peter R. Wich is a Senior Lecturer for Bioorganic and Macromolecular Chemistry in the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (Australia). He is a member of the Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD) and the Australian Center for Nanomedicine (ACN). Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Mainz (Germany) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of California Berkeley (USA).
For his research work on bioinspired nanomaterials, Peter has been awarded the Innovation Prize in Medicinal/Pharmaceutical Chemistry and the Galenus Technology Prize. He is a “Young Member” of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz (Germany). In 2019 he was named Emerging Investigator of the journal Soft Matter, and in 2020 he was selected as Polymer Chemistry Emerging Investigator. In 2022 he received the David Sangster Polymer Science and Technology Achievement Award from the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (RACI).
Peter leads the UNSW Research Lab for Functional Biopolymers. His primary research interests are in macromolecular chemistry and nanotechnology focusing on the chemical modification of natural biopolymers to engineer biocompatible materials for applications in drug delivery, nanomedicine, bio-catalysis, and 3D printing.
