Prof. Zhong-Ren Chen earned his B.S. in 1984 and M.S. in 1987 in Chemical Engineering at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and his M.S. in 1995 and Ph.D. in 1998 in Chemical Engineering and Chemistry under the supervision by 2005 Nobel laureate Prof. Robert H. Grubbs and Prof. Julia A. Kornfield at the California Institute of Technology. He then moved to the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University with Prof. Robert M. Waymouth and to Honeywell Electronics as postdoctoral fellow. His industrial experience also includes 11 years of R&D with Bridgestone Americas in Akron, Ohio. In 2011, he went back to hometown and joined Ningbo University as the Sir Y.K. Pao Distinguished Professor, the dean of the School of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, and founding chairman of the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering. Since 2016, Dr. Chen joined the Southern University of Science and Technology and Grubbs Institute as Chair Professor of Chemistry in Shenzhen, China.

Prof. Chen’s research interest is to harvest desired structures of polymers for optimal properties by various chemical, physical, and engineering approaches, with focus on “old” olefin monomers and “new” advanced materials. Interdisciplinary research creates synergies among organometallic and polymer chemistry, polymer physics and rheology, polymer reaction engineering, self-assembly and multi-scale processing, interfacial science and adhesion, as well as failure mechanism and crack propagation of soft materials and composites.