Wesley Burghardt is a Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering, and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Engineering at Northwestern University. He also holds a courtesy faculty appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Wes earned BS and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and a PhD from Stanford University. He joined the Northwestern faculty in the Fall of 1990, and served as chair of the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering during 2005 – 2009.

Within SOR, Wes was a member of the Bingham Award Committee from 2001-03, chairing the committee in 2003. Wes was a member at large of the Executive Committee from 2003-05, a member of the Nominating Committee from 2006-08, and chair of the Nominating Committee during 2016-17. He has twice been Program Chair for SOR meetings: February 2005 and October 2013. Finally, he co-edited a special issue of J. Rheol. (38, 1069, 1994) featuring papers on Experimental Methods from the October 1993 SOR meeting.

Wes has pursued experimental research focused on development of methods to characterize molecular- or nano-scale structural changes induced in complex fluids by application of flow. This has included applications of flow birefringence to problems in the rheology and fluid mechanics of flexible polymer solutions, but especially the development of in situ x-ray scattering techniques. Taking advantage of Northwestern’s research facilities at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab, Wes’s group has developed numerous instruments for x-ray studies during flow (shear and extensional) and processing (extrusion and injection molding), applying these techniques to numerous problems, including rheology of liquid crystalline polymers, ordered block copolymers, nanocomposites, blends, microemulsions, self-assembled surfactants, and flow-induced polymer crystallization. Wes is the recipient of a Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation (1994), the John Dillon Medal of the American Physical Society (200), and the Society of Rheology Publication Award (2003). He is a Fellow of the APS, SOR, and the Amer. Assoc. for Adv. Science. In 2011 he was named a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern.

Anne M. Grillet is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Engineering Sciences Division at Sandia National Laboratories where she has mentored 7 post-doctoral fellows and numerous students. Prior to joining Sandia, Anne did a post-doctoral fellowship with the Dutch Polymers Institute at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She received a BSE in Chemical Engineering from Tulane University in 1993 and her MS and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

Anne has actively served The Society of Rheology since 2010 first as a member then chair of the Education Committee, chair of the Nominating Committee and more recently leading efforts to streamline and secure The Society’s financial position in several financial committees. She was Technical Co-chair for the annual meeting in Denver introducing the successful Gallery of Rheology contest in 2017 and was elected as a Fellow of The Society this year. Anne additionally is a member of the Fluid Mechanics Programming Board and Women in Chemical Engineering Committee for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers where she is a senior member.

The Society’s mission is to expand the knowledge and practice of rheology most notably through our vibrant annual meetings and highly regarded Journal of Rheology, but the rise of open access publishing creates uncertainty around the future profitability of JOR. As the society approaches its 100th anniversary, we need to be prepared for the future. Now is the time to take advantage of our strong position to grow our society’s mission while fostering the community spirit that makes this group inviting and special.

I have been conducting rheological research at NIST for the past 25 years and currently lead the Polymer Additive Manufacturing and Rheology project. Throughout my career, my primary interest has been the measurement of non-equilibrium phenomena in soft matter, with interests in diverse areas such as liquid crystal dynamics, polymer slippage, confined emulsions and more recently crystallization and additive manufacturing. I have found that a rheological perspective is the key aspect of any problem that involves flow and deformation of a complex material and believe that the concepts and tools that emerge from the rheological community should find broad applicability in industrial applications.

The Society of Rheology has been my primary professional home for many years. I love its openness, collegiality, and all the flavors of rheology. Its focus on engaging and affordable meetings, student involvement, international outreach and stewardship of the premier rheological journal – all led by volunteers - make this a truly unique society.

Volunteering time for the Society is highly rewarding and worthwhile, and I have been happy to serve in various roles over the years. Recently I lead the DC team that organized the 2015 Baltimore meeting (remember the aquarium party?) and served as Technical Co-chair for the lovely February meeting in Tampa. I am humbled by the request to run for Secretary, taking over for Albert Co, who has done an excellent job in this role for many years.

Chris’ love of Rheology started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D in Chemistry in 1994. For the next three years, Chris studied under previous Society of Rheology treasurer, Montgomery Shaw. Chris accepted a National Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in 1997 that brought him to NIST in the Polymers Division where he worked on the rheology of thin film polymers for integrated electronics. Chris moved to his current position with the Engineering Laboratory two years later applied his rheological background to the problem of predicting how polymers change when exposed to outdoor weathering. Chris has been involved in a wide range of research projects related to different aspects of rheology, examples include research on the fundamentals of adhesion loss related to changes in relative humidity, developing working equations for the quartz crystal microbalance, building test methods for spray applied fire resistive materials for structural building elements. In addition, he has managed projects for the Department of Homeland Security on exploring explosive force mitigation within the mass transit system, or projects for the Housing and Urban Development on the degradation of building materials. Dr. White’s research involves close industry collaboration; he has managed research agreements with an average of 15 companies/year for the last 20+ years. Chris is also involved in the development of industry consensus standards and has championed many adopted standards.

Dr. White received an MBA in 2007 from the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Chris has used that degree to start and develop several small businesses. A current venture can be found at Bee-America.com. Chris was also asked to be an adjunct professor for the Smith School and teach courses in Leadership, Project Management and Ethical Behavior in both the Masters of Telecommunications and MBA programs.

Chris has been an active member of The Society of Rheology since 1988. He is the current treasurer and has served since taking over for Monty at the 2015 meeting in Baltimore. As treasurer, Chris is an ex-officio member of the financial advisory committee and audit committee. He has also previously served on the membership committee including a term as chair. Chris was also a local co-organizer of the 2001 Bethesda and 2015 Baltimore meetings.

Ralph H. Colby received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 1979. After working for two years at the General Electric Company in rheology research and process development, he attended graduate school at Northwestern University, where he received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 1983 and 1985. Graduate research focused on rheology of linear polybutadiene melts and solutions, and included 15 months as a visiting scholar in the Exxon Research and Engineering Company, Corporate Research - Science Laboratories. He then worked for ten years at the Eastman Kodak Company in their Corporate Research Laboratories. Rheology research areas over these ten years included linear polymer melts and solutions, miscible polymer blends, block copolymers, randomly branched polymers, polymer gels, liquid crystalline polymers, polyelectrolytes, proteins, surfactants and colloidal suspensions.

In 1995, Dr. Colby was hired as an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University and was promoted to Professor in 2000. He teaches very demanding undergraduate courses on Polymer Rheology and Processing and continues to use rheological and dielectric experiments to probe the dynamics of polymers, ionomers, nanocomposites and other complex fluids. Dr. Colby has over 180 publications, published a textbook Polymer Physics in 2003 and has published seven review articles. He was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand in 2005 and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Imperial College, London in 2012. In 2011 Dr. Colby became the Editor of the Journal of Rheology and he was the 2012 recipient of The Society of Rheology’s Bingham Medal.

At Penn State, research has focused on polyelectrolyte solutions (more than 30 papers), miscible polymer blend dynamics (more than 20 papers) and ionomers (more than 30 papers). Dr. Colby is a recognized leader in liquid state dynamics of polymers and ions, as evidenced by more than 50 invited talks in the last five years, mostly international.

Current research focuses on DFT design (with Mike Janik and Ismaila Dabo) of polar ionomers for optimal ion transport of single-ion conductors; their subsequent synthesis and characterization using X-ray scattering (with Karen Winey at UPenn) to assess the structure, linear viscoelasticity to assess the mechanical properties and dielectric spectroscopy (with Jim Runt) to assess the ion transport properties. This effort was funded for seven years by DOE-BES (five faculty and ten Ph.D. students for which Dr. Colby was the PI) and for five years by a US Army MURI (eight faculty and twenty Ph.D. students, centered at Virginia Tech). Currently this topic is funded by NSF-DMR and Dr. Colby’s students have recently made block copolymer ionomers with 10 MPa modulus and reasonable ionic conductivity near room temperature.

New research areas include flow-induced crystallization of semi-crystalline polymer melts (with Scott Milner and Alicyn Rhoades), characterization of semi-flexible polymers including P3HT that is important for polymer-based photovoltaics (with Enrique Gomez) and solutions of native cellulose in ionic liquids that allow fiber spinning to achieve the true strength of cellulose without the usual chemical modifications that reduce hydrogen bonding and crystallinity. If history repeats itself, one or more of these three new seeds will become the focus of research in the Colby group for the next ten years.

Gordon Christopher is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University where he has worked since 2011. He received a BS in Mechanical Engineering (2002) and a BA in Film (2003) from Columbia University. He attended Carnegie Mellon and graduated with a PhD in Mechanical engineering and a MS in Chemical Engineering in 2008. Afterwards, he spent 2 years in the Polymers Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a NRC Postdoc.

His research focuses on the development on study of complex fluids and interfaces through the development of novel rheological techniques. He has particularly focused on the behavior of particles at interfaces and the interfacial rheology of these systems, and on characterization of biofilm viscoelasticity at solid surfaces and liquid interfaces. His work in this areas resulted in his winning of the TA Distinguished Young Rheologist Award in 2017.

Gordon is an active member of the rheological community. He has been a member of the Society of Rheology for approximately 15 years, served as a member of the membership committee since 2014, was the technical co-chair of the 2018 annual meeting, and is an active participant in Texas Soft Matter meetings.

William Hartt is a technical section head at the Procter & Gamble Co. He is the technical lead and manager for Complex Fluids Engineering within P&Gs Corporate Engineering Technologies Lab. He held various roles at P&G in research and development organizations and engineering organizations since 1996. He earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Virginia Tech.

Will’s research and application areas include rheological measurement and modeling applied to process engineering flows, such as mixing, transport, and filling. Will published articles in the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, Journal of Rheology, Chemical Engineering Science, and The Journal of Visualized Experiments. Will authored an invited chapter in the Royal Society of Chemistry series Wormlike Micelles: Advances in Systems, Characterization, and Applications in 2017. He is active in The Society of Rheology and the AIChE North American Mixing Forum. Will serves on various SOR committees, currently the Metzner Award committee. He was an invited keynote speaker at the 2016 NAMF meeting.

Marie-Claude Heuzey obtained her bachelor degree in Materials Engineering from Polytechnique Montreal in 1994, and her M.Eng. (1996) and Ph.D. (1999) in Chemical Engineering from McGill University. She was Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa before joining the Chemical Engineering Department at Polytechnique Montreal in 2000 where she is now Full Professor since 2010.

Her main research interests are in the area of biopolymers, hydrogels, polyelectrolytes, nanocomposites and suspensions rheology. She is currently leading a group of 10-15 graduate students and has published over 120 peer-reviewed articles, 35 conference papers, four book chapters and one patent.

Marie-Claude has been a member of The Society of Rheology since her graduate studies at McGill University. She has co-organized a special symposium in honour of John Dealy at the SoR 77th Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada (2005). She has also served as a SoR member-at-large during a 2-year mandate (2007-2009) where part of her tasks were to select the “Best Paper Award” for the Journal of Rheology. She was Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee of the SoR 85th Annual Meeting that was held in Montreal (2013), has served on the SoR Education Committee (2009-2017) and on the Bingham Award Committee (2014-2016). Finally, she was co-chair of the Technical Program of the 90th SoR Annual Meeting in Houston (2018).

See also https://www.polymtl.ca/expertises/en/heuzey-marie-claude/

Anke Lindner is an experimental Soft Matter physicist. She is a professor at University Paris Diderot and performs her research at the ESPCI in Paris, France. She studied Physics at the University of Bayreuth Germany before performing a PhD at ENS in Paris and a Post-Doc at ESPCI. In 2002 she became an assistant professor at University Pierre et Marie Curie and in 2013 a full professor at University Paris Diderot. In 2015 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Union and she is the winner of the 2019 Maurice Couette price of the French Society of Rheology.

Anke‘s research focusses on the flow of complex and active suspensions, fluid structure interactions and visco-elastic flow instabilities. Her experimental work takes advantage of recent microfluidic and micro-fabrication techniques. She has published more than 60 papers.

Anke is an active member of the international rheology community. She has been a session chair at the AERC meetings in Karlsruhe, Copenhagen and Portoroz and a technical chair for the SoR Winter meeting in Tampa. She is a delegate of the individual members and since very recently also the secretary of the European Society. She is a member of the advisory council of the German Rheological Society. As an European Professor, active in the European as well as the American Society of Rheology and with a broad scientific interest, Anke can bring an interesting perspective to The Society of Rheology as a Member at Large.

See also https://blog.espci.fr/alindner/

Jason Maxey is a manager within Halliburton’s Global Technology organization, leading efforts in hydrocarbon reservoir stimulation. Based in Houston, Texas, he manages teams in the US, Saudi, and India in development of new chemical systems and components for hydraulic fracturing, acid stimulation, and control of water production. His work applies basic fluid dynamics and rheological principles for turbulent flow management, suspension and transport of particles, and stable systems in real-world extreme environments. Many of his contributions over that last 20 years are in the areas of particle suspension, thixotropic fluids, emulsions, and gelled systems. Jason is also devoted to educating others on rheology, how it applies to their daily problems, and how it can be used for improved solutions.

Jason holds a MS degree in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University, where he built a biaxial squeezing rheometer to study extensional flows with application to blown polymer films. He has been active in The Society of Rheology for the last 15 years, serving on various committees for the last 8 of those years. He has previously served as the Chair of the Membership Committee, from 2014-2018. Most recently he served as local arrangements chair for the 90th Annual Meeting of the Society in October 2018, bringing a record 520 attendees to Houston. Jason has also been active in the American Association of Drilling Engineers and with the Society of Petroleum Engineers.

Further information about Jason and his work can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmaxey.

Jonathan P. Rothstein is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He has served The Society of Rheology in a number of capacities over the years. He has co-organized the technical session of 2011 SoR Annual Meeting. He has been a member of the SoR Education Committee since 2011 and its Chair since 2014. In 2014, he co-developed a K12 Outreach Event for The Society of Rheology called “Panta Rei – Everything Flows,” which has been held annually ahead of the SoR’s Annual Meeting. More recently, he has developed a series of outreach kits along with instruction guides and tutorial videos to facilitate participation in rheology-based outreach activities. For his outreach activities, Prof. Rothstein will be honored this year with an Outstanding Service Award from The Society of Rheology.

Dr. Rothstein received his Bachelors in Engineering from the Cooper Union in 1996. From there he completed his MS at Harvard University in 1998 before getting his PhD from MIT in Mechanical Engineering in 2001. He joined the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts in 2001 and has been a visiting faculty at KU Leuven in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2007 and again in 2015. He has the distinction of having won both an NSF CAREER Award in 2006 and an ONR YIP Award that same year. He has been recognized within the College of Engineering at UMASS with the both an Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015 and the Goldstein Outstanding Faculty Award in 2007. He was the first recipient of Metzner Early Career Award in 2007 from The Society of Rheology. He has won a number of other prestigious awards including the Frenkiel Award from American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS/DFD) in 2002 and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2003.

His current research program focuses on the dynamics of complex fluids. Among other areas, his research has made a significant impact in the fields of non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, hydrodynamics stability, turbulent and laminar drag reduction, microfluidics, shear and extensional rheology, dynamics of wormlike micelle solutions, and polymer processing. He has co-authored more over 80 archival journal publications and is currently a member of the Editorial Board on the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Dynamics.

See also http://www.ecs.umass.edu/mie/faculty/rothstein/index.html.