Ulrich B. Wiesner

Biography

Uli Wiesner studied Chemistry at the Universities of Mainz and California, Irvine. He received his Chemistry Diploma in 1988 from the University of Mainz, Germany, and gained his Ph.D. in 1991 with work on optical information storage in liquid crystalline polymers in the group of Prof. H. W. Spiess at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz. After his Ph.D. he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle de la ville de Paris (E.S.P.C.I.), France, with Prof. L. Monnerie studying the morphology and dynamics of aromatic terpolyesters. In 1993 he returned to the group of Prof. H. W. Spiess were he finished his Habilitation in 1998 with work on structure, order, and dynamics in self-assembled block copolymer systems with additional interactions. He joined the Cornell MS&E faculty in 1999 as an Associate Professor and became a Full Professor in 2005. Since his arrival at Cornell he works at the interface between polymer science and solid-state chemistry.

Research Interest

The goal of current research in the Wiesner group is to combine knowledge about the self-assembly of soft polymeric materials with the functionality of solid-state materials to generate novel hierarchical and multifunctional hybrid materials. Research results of the group on the use of blocked copolymers as structure directing agents for inorganic materials suggest that in analogy to biology, the sequence information of higher order blocked synthetic macromolecular architectures may be used to encode information about hierarchical structure of co-assemblies with ceramic or other materials