Inaugural Lecture on plastic electronics

Mary E. Galvin, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

9:12 a.m., April 21, 2005--Mary E. Galvin will deliver her Inaugural Lecture as Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at 4 p.m., Tuesday, April 26, in 101 Brown Laboratory. Her talk, “Plastic Electronics: Are They the Future?” is open to the public.

Her research focuses on the design and synthesis of electroactive polymers for use in light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Among her major contributions to this field are her findings that:

LED-device efficiency increases when amorphous polymers are used as the active layer;
Photodegradation of the polymer results in the formation of carbonyl groups that are detrimental to photoluminescence;
Copolymer sequence distribution can be used to optimize device performances; and
Energetic disorder can change device efficiency by two orders of magnitude.

Her other research interests include polymers for photovoltaic devices and lithography, morphology in polymer blends and inorganic/organic nanocomposites.

A fellow of the American Physical Society, Galvin serves on the advisory council of Gordon Research Conferences and co-chaired Materials Chemistry workshops for the National Science Foundation and served on panels for the National Research Council.

She has served as editor or on the editorial board of several professional journals and is on the board of reviewers for Science.

A graduate of Manhattanville College, Galvin received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the UD faculty in 1998 from Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, where she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.

Article by Sue Moncure
Photo by Duane Perry

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