Profile

Elsa Reichmanis is Professor and Carl Robert Anderson Chair in Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Director of the Institute for Functional Materials and Devices at Lehigh University. Prior to joining Lehigh, she was Pete Silas Chair in Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech. After receiving her PhD and BS degrees in chemistry from Syracuse University, she started her independent career at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ, where she was named Bell Labs Fellow and rose to be Director of the Materials Research Department. Her research interests include the chemistry, properties, and application of materials technologies for photonic and electronic applications. She has had impact in the design of new imaging chemistries for advanced lithographic applications, and designed one of the first readily accessible and manufacturable polymers for advanced silicon device manufacturing using 193 nm lithography.

The Reichmanis Research Group is exploring polymeric and hybrid organic/inorganic materials chemistries for a range of (opto)electronic device and sustainable energy applications. Her research, at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, optics, and electronics, spans from fundamental concept to technology development and implementation, with particular focus on polymeric and nanostructured materials for advanced technologies. Current efforts aim to identify fundamental parameters that will enable sub-nanometer scale dimensional control of organic, polymer and/or hybrid materials for applications including transistor devices, photovoltaics, and high-capacity energy storage.

Reichmanis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 1995, the National Academy of Inventors in 2021, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. She served as 2003 President of the American Chemical Society (ACS), is a past Member of the Bureau of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the Board of Directors of the American Institute for Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She is currently a Member of the ACS Governing Board for Publishing, Member of the Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences and a Member of the NAE Council. Elsa Reichmanis is the recipient of several awards, including the 2022 John M. Prausnitz AIChE Institute Lecture Award and 2018 AIChE Margaret H. Rousseau Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement by a Woman Chemical Engineer, the ACS Awards in the Chemistry of Materials (2018), Applied Polymer Science (1999) and Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences (2024), the Society of Chemical Industry’s Perkin Medal (2001) and the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award (1993). She is an elected Member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ACS, AIChE, the Materials Research Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry. In other service, she is an Executive Editor of the ACS Journal, Chemistry of Materials.