Carlos R. López Barrón

ExxonMobil Chemical Company

Chemical Engineer

Fellow, Elected 2024

Dr. Carlos López-Barrón is a research scientist at the ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Company. He received a B.S. from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1999), a M.S. from Universidad de Guadalajara (2002), and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota (2009), under the supervision of Christopher Macosko. From 2009 to 2011, he conducted post-doctoral studies at the University of Delaware’s Center for Neutron Science Center, under the supervision of Norm Wagner. In 2011, he joined the ExxonMobil Chemical Company as the lead rheologist, and after a few years, he moved to the product research section where he has led several research programs.

From the earlier 2000's, Carlos's research work has focused on understanding the relationships between microstructure, properties and performance of polymer systems, including thermoplastics, thermosets, copolymers and polymers blends. As a master student, he developed correlations between processing parameters, microstructure and transport properties of blown films made of polymer blends. His Ph.D. thesis focused on the study of coarsening dynamics and viscoelasticity of immiscible polymer blends, for which he developed novel microscopy techniques to study their 3D morphology. As a postdoctoral researcher, he studied the microstructure and nonlinear viscoelastic behavior of micellar solutions, crystals, gels and networks using novel in-situ time-resolved rheo-SANS techniques. One of these studies resulted in the invention of a novel ionoelastomer with mechano-electrical response. His research at ExxonMobil has involved several areas related to the development of new polyolefins (PO). These studies include synthesis, structure/property and rheological studies of PO bottlebrushes, graft and hyper-branched PO block copolymers, cyclopentene rubbers and PO ionomers, H/D exchange studies in commercial POs, PO/polydiene blend thermodynamics studies and non-linear rheological studies of PO copolymers and blends. For these studies, Carlos and his collaborators developed and implemented new advanced in-situ characterization devices including extensional rheo-SANS and extensional rheo-Raman and tensile -SANS, -SAXS/WAXS, and -SALS. Additionally, his work has resulted in 66 peerreviewed journal article, 2 book chapters and 20 patents (11 of them granted). In recognition for his research work, Dr. López-Barrón was elected as ACS Poly Fellow in 2022.

Carlos has served the Society of Rheology as member of the Membership Committee. He also coorganized the Polymer Solutions and Melts symposium for the 2017 annual meeting at Tampa and was a member of the local planning committee for the 2018 Annual Meeting at Houston.