John Tsavalas is a Polymer Scientist with particular emphasis in polymer colloids (nanoparticles synthesized from polymers). He is an Associate Professor in Chemistry and also a member of the Materials Science Program. He is the Director of the UNH Latex Morphology Industrial Consortium and the Deputy Director of the Center for Advanced Materials & Manufacturing Innovations (CAMMI). For the month of June 2012, he was a Visiting Professor of Polymer Chemistry at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, in the LCPP group, invited by Professors Timothy McKenna and Bernadette Charleux. 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, and he was most recently the chair of the Polymer Reaction Engineering Conference in May 2018 (as well as the co-chair in 2015). Prior to joining University of New Hampshire, he was a Senior Research Scientist at The Dow Chemical Company 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 in Atlanta, USA
Research Interests
• Control of colloidal morphology in polymeric nanoparticle synthesis (encapsulation, multi-component structured latex, hollow latex, hybrid (alkyd/acrylic, PU/acrylic) latex, 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
