Matyjaszewski began studying chemistry at Lodz University of Technology in late 1960s and later graduated from the Petrochemical University in Moscow.[8] He received his doctorate from the Center of Molecular and Macromolecular Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1976 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Florida in 1977. From 1978 to 1984, he was a research associate of the Polish Academy of Sciences. From 1984 to 1985, Matyjaszewski held appointments at the University of Paris, first as a research associate and then as a visiting professor.[2] In 1985, he joined the chemistry department at Carnegie Mellon University. He founded and currently directs the university's Center for Macromolecular Engineering.[9] This center is funded both by an active consortium and government agencies, including the National Science Foundation. In 1998, Matyjaszewski was appointed the J.C. Warner Professor of Natural Sciences. In 2004 he was named a university professor, the highest distinction faculty can achieve at Carnegie Mellon.[10] Matyjaszewski is also an adjunct professor in Carnegie Mellon's department of materials science and chemical engineering.[11]
From 1994 to 1998, Matyjaszewski served as head of the department of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon and assisted in recruiting additional faculty with strengths in polymer chemistry. At the same time, he formed a research consortium with various industrial corporations to expand the understanding of controlled radical polymerization, including ATRP, and accelerate the transfer of this technology to different commercial applications. A second consortium, the CRP Consortium, formed under his leadership in 2001, continues and expands these efforts, training university and industrial scientists in procedures for responsive polymeric material development [12] and has comprised 60 industrial members.[13] The same year, Matyjaszewski became an adjunct professor at Polish Academy of Sciences and at the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering of the University of Pittsburgh.[2]
Matyjaszewski is a co-inventor on 66 issued U.S. patented technologies and holds over 150 international patents.[10]
One of the leading educators in the field of polymer chemistry, Matyjaszewski has mentored more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students since joining Carnegie Mellon. He has co-authored 25 books, 100 book chapters and more than 1200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited in the scientific literature more than 170,000 times, with an h-index of 203,[14] making him one of the most cited chemists in the world.[1][2][15][13]
Matyjaszewski's work has been recognized in his native country of Poland. In 2004, he received the annual Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science, the most prestigious scientific award in Poland, referred to as the Polish Nobel Prize.[1] In 2005 he became a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Science. He received honorary degrees from Polish universities Lodz University of Technology in 2007 and Poznań University in 2016.[26] He has also received honorary degrees from the Technion,[29] Israel, the University of Ghent, Belgium, Russian Academy of Sciences, University of Athens, Greece, Polytechnic Institute in Toulouse, France, Pusan National University in South Korea.[citation needed], Universite P. & M. Curie, Sorbonne in Paris,[30] University of Padua, Italy and University of Coimbra, Portugal.[31]
^Wang, Jin-Shan; Matyjaszewski, Krzysztof (May 1995). "Controlled/"living" radical polymerization. Atom transfer radical polymerization in the presence of transition-metal complexes". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 117 (20): 5614–5615. Bibcode:1995JAChS.117.5614W. doi:10.1021/ja00125a035.
^"PTN Medema Lecture Award". PTN Dutch National Graduate School of Polymer Science and Technology. Archived from the original on 4 October 2017. Retrieved 3 October 2017.
