The first academic to deliver a lecture at Wrocław Tech‘s Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar after the summer break was Prof. Krzysztof Matyjaszewski of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The professor is a world-renowned expert in polymer chemistry.

During his visit to Wrocław University of Science and Technology, he gave a lecture entitled “Advanced materials by taming free radicals” (22 October, Wrocław Tech’s Congress Centre.

Prof. Krzysztof Matyjaszewski works at the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (USA). He is director of the Center for Macromolecular Engineering, also heading a controlled radical polymerisation consortium involving 60 companies hailing from the chemicals industry.

The academic has published 24 monographs and 1,200 articles, cited over 160,000 times (100,000 in the last decade) according to Google Scholar (h-index 197). Author of 65 US patents and over 150 international patents, he is a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, as well as a member of Russian, Australian, and European Academies of Sciences. 

Prof. Matyjaszewski has been awarded 11 honorary doctorates. He has received several awards for his innovations in the field of polymer chemistry – most importantly, for his discovery of the ATRP method (atom transfer radical polymerisation), which allows the controlled synthesis of macromolecules with a precisely defined structure. 

His numerous awards include the 2009 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, 2013:Inaugural AkzoNobel North American Science Award, 2015 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences, 2017 Franklin Medal in Chemistry, 2019 Chemistry of Materials Award and 2021 Grand Prix de la Fondation de la Maison de la Chimie, as well as the Polish Science Foundation Award (2004) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Medal (2012).