Frank Leibfarth's Biography

Frank Leibfarth, Assistant Professor, Chemistry Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Frank A. Leibfarth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his B.A. in both chemistry and physics at the University of South Dakota in 2008. Frank conducted his graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the direction of Professor Craig J. Hawker on the use of the ketene functional group in polymer chemistry. Upon the completion of his PhD in 2013, he accepted an NSF postdoctoral fellowship to work under the direction of Professor Timothy F. Jamison at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the continuous flow synthesis of sequence-defined copolymers. Frank began his independent career in 2016 at UNC. His research interests focus on creating new methods for the synthesis of polymers that impact sustainability and human health. Specifically, his group is enhancing the properties of commodity polymers through C–H functionalization, pursuing new methods to control tacticity in ionic polymerization mechanisms, and exploiting the benefits of continuous-flow chemistry for the synthesis of new macromolecular architectures. Frank received the 3M non-tenured faculty award in 2016 and a Young Investigator Prize from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2017.