Robert Cohen
St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering; Associate Director, DuPont MIT Alliance
areas of expertise: physics and chemistry of polymers, polymer viscoelasticity, structure-property relationships, polymer surfaces, polymer interfaces, block copolymers
Bob Cohen studied at Cornell (BS), Caltech (MS and PhD) and Oxford (postdoc) before joining the MIT faculty in 1973. He is the founding director of MIT’s Program in Polymer Science and Technology and the architect of MIT’s unique doctoral program in chemical engineering practice.
Currently, he is the St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering. He has been a director of the DuPont MIT Alliance since its inception in 2000. His publications reflect interests in polymer structure-property relations. On the basis of patents produced in his laboratory, he cofounded MatTek Corporation (www.mattek.com) in 1985. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering, the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society. In 2010 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Cohen and his wife, Jane, live in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. They have two children: Genevieve, a kindergarten teacher in San Diego, and Eliot who works in information technology in Boston.
request an interview: Sarah McDonnell | 617-253-8923 | s_mcd@mit.edu