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An only child growing up in Greece “free from electronic distractions,” Andrew J. Lovinger entertained himself by “reading and taking things apart to see what made them work.” As an adult, he’s built a career out of effectively taking apart crystalline polymeric systems to see what makes them work at the molecular level.
Lovinger, director of the National Science Foundation’s Polymers Program, began his work studying crystalline polymers and their structural evaluation at Columbia University, where he earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering and applied chemistry. He dissected the crystalline structure and morphology of such industrially important materials as polypropylene and poly(vinylidene fluoride). Through these studies, he became an expert in electron microscopy and X-ray and electron diffraction analysis.
In 1977, directly after finishing his Ph.D., Lovinger joined the technical staff of Bell Laboratories. “Bell Labs was ‘the’ place to do research,” he says. “I worked with the best people in the world in an environment that fostered fundamental, yet technologically relevant, research. It was a marvelous place.” And he was working in an emerging, exciting area: the application of polymers in the field of electronics. A critical requirement that Lovinger demonstrated was the need for understanding and controlling structure-morphology-processing-property relationships in crystalline polymers.
Stephen Z. D. Cheng, Robert C. Musson & Trustees Professor of Polymer Science and dean of the College of Polymer Science & Engineering at the University of Akron, describes Lovinger as the “key research leader on ferroelectric and piezoelectric, or ‘smart,’ materials.” These materials translate pressure into electricity and thus can be used as sensors, detectors, or transducers of various kinds, from home security systems (infrared detectors) to national security systems (submarine hydrophones) to medical diagnostics (ultrasound probes).
Cheng points to Lovinger’s demonstration that poly(vinylidene fluoride) exhibited ferroelectric properties previously unseen in polymeric materials and to his work both elucidating their morphology and phase behavior and correlating them with the materials’ electronic and mechanical properties. Lovinger, he explains, “discovered a unique room-temperature process to create materials of variable but controlled ferroelectric content and explained their processing-property aspects based on molecular conformational changes.”
Lovinger has also made “landmark contributions to plastic electronics,” says Elsa Reichmanis, by “providing the fundamental understanding of structure-processing-property correlations for polymeric and organic transistor technologies on flexible plastic substrates.” Reichmanis, a former Bell Labs colleague, is a chemical engineering professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. Lovinger’s meticulous structural and morphological work contributed to commercialization of such products as electronic books, flexible plastic displays, and so-called smart cards.
After 20 years at Bell Labs, Lovinger took on a new challenge in 1997 when he moved to NSF, where he saw the opportunity to nourish the polymer field and provide support for polymer scientists. He takes pride in mentoring young researchers and enabling the growth of the field and the community.
His work has always been interdisciplinary, and Lovinger is pleased to have been recognized by the physics, engineering, and now chemistry communities. He received the American Physical Society’s Polymer Physics Prize in 2003 and in 2004 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He’s authored more that 170 publications and has garnered more than 8,500 Web of Science citations. Lovinger is also an associate editor for Macromolecules.
Lovinger will present the award address before the Division of Polymeric Materials: Science & Engineering.
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