Biography

Ulrich (Uli) Wiesner studied Chemistry at the University of Mainz, Germany, and UC Irvine, CA. He gained his Ph.D. in 1991 in Physical Chemistry with work at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P), Mainz, on holographic information storage in polymer liquid crystals. After a two-year postdoc at E.S.P.C.I. in Paris, France, on local dynamics-mechanical property correlations in polyesters, he returned to the MPI-P in 1993. In 1998 he finished his Habilitation with work on block copolymers under oscillatory shear and block copolymer ionomers and received tenure as an MPI-P staff member. He joined the Cornell University, NY, Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) faculty in 1999 as a tenured Associate Professor, became a Full Professor in 2005, and since 2008 is the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering. At Cornell, he holds secondary appointments (field membership) in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), Biomedical Engineering (BME), Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB), and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Since January of 2023 he is an inaugural faculty member of the multi-college Department of Design Tech at Cornell and Professor of Design Tech. Since his arrival at Cornell, he has worked at the interface between polymer science and inorganic/solid-state chemistry with the goal to generate multifunctional nanomaterials for applications including energy conversion and storage, clean water, and nanomedicine. From 2015-2021 he was the co-director of the MSKCC-Cornell Center for Translation of Cancer Nanomedicine (MC2TCN), one of six Centers for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence (CCNE) funded by the NCI (https://www.cancer.gov/sites/ocnr/research/alliance/ccne).