Judit E. Puskas, Ph. D., P. Eng

Dr. Puskas received a PhD in plastics and rubber technology in 1985, and an M. E. Sc in organic and biochemical engineering in 1977, from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary. Her advisors were Professors Ferenc Tüdös and Tibor Kelen of Hungary, and Professor Joseph P. Kennedy at the University of Akron, Ohio, USA, in the framework of collaboration between the National Science Foundation of the USA and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She started her academic career in 1996. Before that she was involved in polymer research and development in the microelectronic, paint and rubber industries. Her present interests include green polymer chemistry, biomimetic processes and biomaterials, living/controlled polymerizations, polymerization mechanisms and kinetics, thermoplastic elastomers and polymer structure/property relationships, and probing the polymer-bio interface. She is one of the editors of the new Interdisciplinary Reviews in Nanomedicine and NanoBiotechnology WIRE, Published by Wiley-Blackwell, and a member of the Advisory Board, of the European Polymer Journal. Until July of 2008 she was one of the two regional Editors with the highest citation index. She was also member of the IUPAC Working Party IV.2.1 "Structure-property relationships of commercial polymers". Puskas has been published in more than 350 publications, including technical reports, is an inventor or co-inventor of 26 U.S. patents and applications, and has been Chair or organizer of a number of international conferences. Puskas has been awarded her fourth NSF and first NIH grant (the first ever in the Department of Polymer Science) in 2010. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 1999 PEO (Professional Engineers of Ontario, Canada) Medal in Research&Development, a 2000 Premier's Research Excellence Award, the 2004 Mercator Professorship Award from the DFG (Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, German Research Foundation), the LANXESS (previously Bayer) Industrial Chair 1998-2008, and the 2009 “Chemistry of Thermoplastic Elastomers” Award of the Rubber Division of the American Chemical Society, and the Woman of Achievement Award. She was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering AIMBE in 2010. In 2012 she was one of the five winners of the GE Healthymagination Breast Cancer Challenge Award, selected from 400 international applications.

As a coinventor of the polymer used on the Taxus® coronary stent, Puskas helped the University of Akron generate more than $5 million in license fees. With her business partners they founded Arbomatrix LLC and Akron-Austin Monomers-Polymers LLC for supplying specialty monomers and polymers for biomedical and other applications.