Ryan Hayward

About

Ryan Hayward is the James and Catherine Patten Endowed Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he also serves as the Department Chair. His research interests focus on the assembly of polymer and particle-based nanostructures, the mechanics and instabilities of soft active materials, and active polymer materials and interfaces. His group works on projects related to soft and stimulus-responsive polymer films that can be dynamically reconfigured to change their structures and properties, utilizing mechanical instabilities and patterned growth to drive structural transformations. He has a background in chemical engineering, having earned his BSE from Princeton University in 1999 and his PhD from UC Santa Barbara in 2004. His work involves studying the self-assembly of polymers and particles in various contexts, including emulsion processing, solution-state crystallization-driven assembly, and melt-state organization in nanocomposites. His research aims to develop approaches to tailor nanoscale structures for applications such as encapsulation, delivery, and renewable energy. Hayward has received numerous awards for his contributions to the field, including the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Overall Achievement Award, Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Composite material
• Nanotechnology
• Chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Chemical engineering
• Computer Science
• Polymer chemistry
• Artificial Intelligence
• Optics

Selected publications

• Directional Adhesion of Monodomain Liquid Crystalline Elastomers

  ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces · 2024-01-24 · 34 citations

  articleCorresponding

  Pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSAs) are widely employed in consumer goods, health care, and commercial industry. Anisotropic adhesion of PSAs is often desirable to enable high force capacity coupled with facile release and has typically been realized through the introduction of complex surface and/or bulk microstructures while also maintaining high surface conformability. Although effective, microstructure fabrication can add cost and complexity to adhesive fabrication. Here, we explore aligned…

  PublisherDOI

• Pendent Sulfonylimide Ionic Liquid Monomers and Ionoelastomers via SuFEx Click Chemistry

  Chemistry of Materials · 2023-11-29 · 14 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Anionic polymerized ionic liquids with a fixed sulfonylimide group have emerged as promising materials for energy storage applications, electromechanical devices, and gas separation membranes due to their highly delocalized anionic charges. However, synthetic challenges have limited the production of high-purity poly(sulfonylimide)s at scale and hindered systematic evaluation of their properties. We report a synthetic route for the production of high-purity sulfonylimide monomers at >10 g scales…

  PublisherDOI

• Visible Light-Triggered Microactuators and Dynamic Surfaces from Hydrogels Containing Photoswitchable Host–Guest Complexes

  ACS Applied Polymer Materials · 2024-05-27 · 6 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Light-responsive hydrogels garner considerable interest due to their ability to undergo a wide variety of shape transformations that can be triggered remotely and with fine spatiotemporal control. To this end, photoswitchable supramolecular complexes offer a convenient route to tune hydrophilicity of hydrogels; however, thus far, this approach has required the use of potentially damaging ultraviolet light. To address this limitation, we introduce a light-responsive supramolecular hydrogel that c…

  PublisherDOI

• Interconnected Nanoporous Polysulfone by the Self-Assembly of Randomly Linked Copolymer Networks and Linear Multiblocks

  ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces · 2024-06-18 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Porous materials have attracted considerable attention due to their versatile applications, especially in water purification. Interconnected nanoporous structures are distinguished by their high degree of porosity and resistance to clogging, as well as their insensitivity to nanostructural orientation. Previous works on randomly linked copolymer systems have shown that they can effectively produce disordered cocontinuous nanostructures, which upon removal of one component yield interconnected na…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Formation of Disordered Cocontinuous Phases by Randomly Linked Star Copolymers

  Macromolecules · 2024-12-25 · 5 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Cocontinuous polymeric nanostructures have garnered significant interest due to their ability to combine different properties of two separate polymer domains. Randomly linked copolymer networks have proven to be especially robust for formation of disordered cocontinuous phases across wide composition ranges (≈30 wt % or more). While theoretical treatments of microphase-separated networks have focused primarily on the role of random elastic forces imposed on the self-assembled nanostructures by v…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Shape Morphing Polymer Networks Based on Ion Gels

  NSF · $680k · 2016–2020

• Beyond wrinkles and creases: Generalized and tailored instabilities of polymer films

  NSF · $336k · 2013–2016

• CAREER: Creasing of Surface-Attached Polymer Gels

  NSF · $482k · 2008–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Bradley F. Chmelka

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  50 shared

• Todd Emrick

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  47 shared

• Christian D. Santangelo

  Syracuse University

  47 shared

• Zhigang Suo

  Harvard University

  28 shared

• Niklas Hedin

  Stockholm University

  25 shared

• Sean C. Christiansen

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  25 shared

• Juergen Eckert

  25 shared

• Christel Gervais

  25 shared

Education

• B.S., Chemical Engineering

  Princeton University

  1999

• Ph.D., Chemical Engineering

  UC Santa Barbara

  2004

Awards & honors

• Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Overall Ac…
• Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering Service Aw…
• National Science Foundation Special Creativity Extension (20…
• Fellow of the American Physical Society (2018)
• Blavatnik National Awards Finalist in Physical Sciences & En…

Similar researchers at University of Colorado Boulder

• Michael D. McGeheeh-147
• Christopher N. Bowmanh-114
• Andrew P. Goodwinh-31