John Tsavalas is a Polymer Scientist & Polymer Reaction Engineer with particular emphasis in Polymer Colloids (nanoparticles synthesized from polymers). He is an Associate Professor in Chemistry and an Affiliate Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. He is the Director of the UNH Latex Morphology Industrial Consortium and the Deputy Director of the Center for Advanced Materials & Manufacturing Innovations (CAMMI) as well as co-PI in the NH BioMade research center. He has been a visiting professor at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (2019), University of Lyon, France (2012), and had a sabbatical at the University of the Basque Country, Spain (in Fall of 2023). He was most recently the chair of the 2018 Polymer Reaction Engineering conference, where in both 2011 and 2015 he was the organizer of the International Polymer Colloids Group Conference (those two times held on the campus of UNH). Prior to joining University of New Hampshire, he was a Senior Research Scientist at The Dow Chemical Company (Michigan USA and Horgen, Switzerland) where he worked on a wide variety of polymer colloid related R&D with particular emphasis on nanostructured latex particles. Before that, he was a Visiting Scholar in Polymer Chemistry at Eindhoven Technical University in The Netherlands just following his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (2001) in Atlanta, Georgia USA.
Research Interests
• Control of colloidal morphology in polymeric nanoparticle synthesis (encapsulation, multi-component structured particles, hollow particles, non-spherical particles, etc.)
• Colloids derived from sustainable starting materials
• Clustering and assembly of particulate systems
• Molecular and macromolecular architecture control by living free-radical polymerization
• Dynamic modeling of colloidal interactions, film formation, & evolution of multi-phase morphology
• Dynamic modeling of reaction kinetics, macromolecular architecture development, phase separation, and particle morphology development for colloidal synthesis
• Hydroplasticization of copolymers and impact on diffusion, phase separation, and viscoelastic properties
• Distribution of water within polymer colloids
