Dr. Christopher Bowman Receives 2018 Tess Award

Dr. Christopher N. Bowman of the University of Colorado, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, will receive the 2018 Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings. The award is presented annually by the Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering (PMSE) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in recognition of outstanding contributions to coatings science, engineering, and technology.

Bowman obtained his B.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. He began his academic career at the University of Colorado as an assistant professor in 1992 and is currently the James and Catherine Patten endowed chair and a distinguished professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Bowman has made significant contributions to the field of polymer science and engineering with applications in coatings. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to the fundamental understanding of photopolymerization systems and reaction engineering of crosslinked polymer systems. Bowman has made important contributions to both the fundamental understanding of the kinetics, mechanisms, structure and properties of photopolymer systems, and the creative development of new coating applications for these polymeric materials. He has published more than 350 articles related to polymeric materials and has been awarded 25 patents including seven that have been licensed or optioned to eight different industrial companies. Bowman has received numerous prestigious awards including the AIChE Materials Science Division C.M.A. Stine award in 2009, the ACS PMSE Division Cooperative Research Award in 2007, the AICHE R.H. Wilhelm award in 2001, and the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator award in 1997.

Bowman has performed research that will continue to have applications in polymer coatings. Recent examples include his work in highly reactive acrylate monomers, his fundamental characterization of thiol-ene reactions, experimental and theoretical analysis of both degradable network structures and those containing dynamic, exchangeable covalent bonds, and his groundbreaking research in biopolymer-base microfluidic systems.

In another major contribution to polymerization reaction engineering, Bowman was the first to exploit living radical photopolymerizations (LRPs) as a tool to better characterize network material properties, and the use of LRPs to create materials with unique properties not achievable by other polymerization techniques. He has also performed definitive studies on thiol-ene photopolymerization reactions. These reactions represent the only known step growth radical-mediated polymerization process, and he has successfully engineered these reactions to utilize this advantage in applications as diverse as dental materials, microdevices, polymer derived ceramics, coatings, and photolithographic materials.

Bowman will receive the Tess Award from Dr. Melissa A. Grunlan, chair of the PMSE Division, in August 2018 during the 256^thNational Meeting of the ACS in Washington, D.C.