Rachel Segalman has been appointed as the acting director of the Materials Sciences Division, effective July 8. The Molecular Foundry is a part of the Material Sciences Division. She is the lead principal investigator for the Thermoelectrics Program and project leader for the Membranes and Mesoscale Assembly at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP). Segalman is also a professor of chemical engineering at UC Berkeley and a current User at the Foundry. She replaced Jeff Neaton, who had been serving as acting division director since July of last year and recently assumed the role of acting director of the Molecular Foundry.
Segalman is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and an Associate Faculty Scientist in the Materials Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Segalman received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering with highest honors from the University of Texas at Austin. During the summers of 1993-96, she interned at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque) and at the University of Texas. She then performed her doctoral work in Chemical Engineering (polymer physics) at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1998-2002.
Following her PhD, Segalman was a postdoctoral fellow at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg France. She then joined the faculty of UC Berkeley in the spring of 2004 as the Charles Wilke Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and was subsequently promoted to the ranks of Associate (2009) and then Full Professor (2013). She received the 2012 Dillon Medal from the American Physical Society and is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Rachel has also received the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE), MDV Innovators Award, TR35: Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35, Hellman Family Young Faculty Award, 3M Untenured Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, Intel Young Faculty Seed Award, and Chateaubriand Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Segalman is the Lead PI for the LBL Thermoelectrics Program and Project Leader for Membranes and Mesoscale Assembly at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP). She has held various leadership roles in MSD, LBNL and the science community. She is currently serving on the Science and Technology Committees for the Board of Governors at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories and is an Associate Editor for ACS Macro Letters and the Annual Reviews of Chemical Engineering. Segalman is also an active member of APS, ACS, MRS, and AIChE.
