Professor Matthew Tirrell

Matthew Tirrell is the dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, since 2011, with a joint appointment as a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. Tirrell received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Northwestern University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in 1977 in Polymer Science from the University of Massachusetts. He is the recipient of the title Doctor Honoris Causa from the Université de Bordeaux in 2019. Previous positions: professor (1977-1999) and head (1994-1999) of chemical engineering & materials science at Minnesota, chair of bioengineering at Berkeley (2009-2011), dean of engineering at UC Santa Barbara (1999-2009), and deputy director for science at Argonne (2015-2018). He has co-authored about 400 papers, one book, has six U.S. patents and has supervised about 100 Ph.D. students and 50 postdocs in areas of polymer science, interfacial phenomena, self-assembly and nanomedicine. Tirrell is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.