Ludwik Leibler - Biography#

Dr. Leibler, exceptional grade senior researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and adjunct professor at Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI) in Paris is the director of Soft Matter and Chemistry Laboratory at ESPCI.

Dr. Leibler received his PhD in 1976 in Theoretical Physics from Warsaw University, and then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow with Professor Pierre-Gilles de Gennes at the College de France. He is a researcher at CNRS initially in Strasbourg (1979-1984) then in Paris (1984-1996), where he made seminal contributions in the area of polymer self-assembly and dynamics, interfaces, gels and charged polymers. From 1996 to 2003 he was the founding director of a joint laboratory between CNRS and chemical company Elf-Atochem (later Arkema)). This unique endeavour assembled researchers from academe and industry to tackle longstanding problems including the development of nano-structured materials, super-tough polymers or stimuli-responsive surfaces. Several of his pathbreaking discoveries led to now commercial materials. In 2001 he became Professor of Soft Matter and Chemistry at Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles in Paris where his research interests include design and synthesis of self-healing materials, supramolecular chemistry, composites, and design of stimuli responsive systems. His recent breakthrough discovery of a new class of organic materials, called vitrimers, which are insoluble, but are malleable at high temperatures and solidify very progressively when cooled, like glass, spurred intensive research and development activity of his laboratory and numerous collaborations with academic and industrial partners.