BioE Graduate Seminars

Event Introduction

Polymers, Interfaces, and Materials Science

About the speaker

Eugenia Kumacheva received her M.Sc. degree from the Institute of Chemical Technology (now Technical University) in Saint Petersburg (Russia). She did her Ph.D. research in Physical Chemistry of Polymers at the Institute of Physical Chemistry (Russian Academy of Science). After PhD defence, she joined the Department of Chemistry at the Moscow State University.

In 1991-1994 Eugenia Kumacheva was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Jacob Klein at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), where she studied surface forces in thin layers of simple liquids and polymers. In 1995 she joined the group of Professor Mitchel Winnik in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where she was involved in studies of morphology of multicomponent polymer systems.  In 1996 Eugenia Kumacheva joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor. In 2005 she became a Full Professor.

She spent her first sabbatical in 2002 in Harvard University with Professor George Whitesides. She was Visiting Professor in Oxford University (2003), the University Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg) (2006), Moscow State University (2009), the University of Cambridge (2010) and the University of Bayreuth (Germany) (2011).

Eugenia Kumacheva serves or served on Advisory Boards of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA), and the Triangle Materials Science and Engineering Center (USA), RIKEN Institute (Japan), Leibnitz Institute for Interactive Materials (Germany), Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (Germany), and Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Germany). She serves on the European Research Council Chemistry committee and is a member of the New Fellows Committee of the Royal Society (U.K.). She is an Associate Editor of Science Advances. Since 2018 professor Kumacheva has been a member of the international jury for L'Oreal-UNESCO "Women in Science" award and has been serving as a Nature research awad ambassador.