Patrick T. Spicer

University of New South Wales

Chemical Engineer

Fellow, Elected 2025

Dr. Patrick Spicer is a leading scientist in the area of complex fluids. His work designs smart fluids with unique response and flow behavior, which he then links to product and material performance. Patrick is able to do this because of his impressive career path that has spanned academics and industry. He uses his vast experience in industry to inform the problems that he now works on in his academic group. Patrick studied chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He then went on to complete a PhD at the University of Cincinnati mentored by Prof. Sotiris Pratsinis. After his PhD, Patrick worked at the Procter & Gamble Company in Cincinnati. He spent his whole career in the Corporate Engineering division, supporting all of P&G’s billion dollar brands in scale-up and troubleshooting research. P&G’s brands are products largely built on formulated complex fluid products, where their microstructure and rheology dictate their value far more than their composition. Notable accomplishments at P&G include creation of a process to produce nanoparticles of bicontinuous cubic liquid crystalline phase, cubosomes, using a simple dilution technique, leading the company efforts to transfer new innovations in microrheology to enable the study of complex products for prediction of stability and processability and identifying the use of anisotropic colloids to enhance efficiency of yield stress fluid creation without significant viscosity increase. Patrick moved to University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 2012, after 15 years at P&G, where he runs a group studying complex fluid microstructures. His current focus is expanding the awareness and utilization of rheology and complex fluid microstructure research to enhance design of commercial products. He started a Chemical Product Engineering major at UNSW, educating chemical engineering and food science undergraduates to design and manufacture formulated fluid products. He created and teaches the Complex Fluid Microstructure and Rheology elective course and a two-semester capstone design course on Chemical Product Design that has produced novel product prototypes for ten years. Students from this course stream are the new generation of commercial product developers, engineers, and formulators and the course routinely produces venture capital funding offers and jobs for UNSW’s students. Patrick has also served The Society of Rheology in many roles including serving on several committees, teaching two short courses and serving on the international advisory committee for the XIXth International Congress on Rheology. Patrick is also an active mentor in the rheology community and has helped shape the vision and careers of many rheologists. Patrick’s unique perspective in the field of rheology with expertise in both industrial and academic problems has led to an impressive career filled with incredibly creative research, invaluable education and mentoring and service to the rheology community.