Eva Harth

Eva M. Harth FRSC is a full professor at the University of Houston and director of the Welch Center for Excellence in Polymer Chemistry. The current research direction of the Harth group focuses on incorporating functional groups into polyolefins. Furthermore, the group has a long-standing interest in novel biomedical materials and technologies to increase the therapeutic function of synthetic and biological substances.

She received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Bonn, B.S. and the University of Zurich, M.S. At the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research under the guidance of Klaus Müllen she worked towards her PhD on fullerene-based polymers and moved to the US as NSF postdoctoral fellow to the IBM Almaden Research Center. After the two years working with Craig Hawker on polymeric nanoparticles and nitroxide polymerization, she moved to a start-up company XenoPort. In 2004, she started at Vanderbilt University as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2011 and served three years as director and DGS of the Interdisciplinary Materials Science Graduate Program (IMS).

During her career at Vanderbilt, she developed the nanosponge delivery system that is licensed by a start-up company. The biodegradable nanoparticle composed of crosslinked polyester, containing tiny cavities that can store drug molecules. The nanoparticle breaks down in the body, releasing the drug in a predictable fashion and can be further functionalized with a targeting peptide to favor drug delivery to cancerous cells.[1]

With the move to the University of Houston as full professor in 2017 she expanded her research interest into the area of metal-organic chemistry and her group is combining polymerization methodologies to design novel polymer structures containing polyolefins.

In 2017 she received a Gutenberg Chair Award from the University of Strasbourg[2] and was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. From 2009 to 2018 she served as an associate editor for Polymer Chemistry, a journal of the RSC.

She is a member of the advisory board of Polymer Chemistry[3] and of the executive board of European Polymer Journal.[4]