Maria Santore

Maria Santore is a Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering, with a secondary appointment Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Santore was trained formally as a Chemical Engineer, obtaining her B.S. at Carnegie Mellon and Ph.D. at Princeton. Following her Ph.D., Santore’s postdoctoral studies of polymer glasses and blends in the Polymer Division at NIST in Gaithersburg MD were supported by an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.

She joined the Chemical Engineering Department at Lehigh University as the Dana Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor in subsequent years. She was awarded the Alfred Nobel Robinson Award for outstanding research in 1996 and was named the Class of 1961 Chaired Associate Professor while at Lehigh. Following a sabbatical at the Institute for Medicine and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania she joined the University of Massachusetts Department of Polymer Science and Engineering as a Full Professor.

Santore is currently a senior editor of Langmuir, the ACS (American Chemical Society) Journal of Surfaces and Colloids, and a section editor for the Elsevier Journal Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science. She is a Fellow in the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. She was awarded the 2015 Hopper Lectureship in Engineering by the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on dynamic aspects of bioadhesion, cell manipulation, and targeted delivery using polymers, biomacromolecules, colloids, and nanoparticles at surfaces.