Douglas Adamson is currently on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and a member of the Polymer Program at the University of Connecticut. Prior to his appointment at UCONN, Doug was at Princeton University for 13 years, Exxon Corporate Research for 2 years, and spent a year at the Max-Plank Institut Für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. He received his PhD from Prof. George Olah at the University of Southern California in Organic Chemistry. 

Prof. Adamson’s research interests center around the synthesis of polymeric materials and composites. His research group is one of the few groups in the world to practice high vacuum anionic polymerization for the synthesis of well defined and architecturally controlled model polymers. The group also has developed a new approach for the formation of polymer brushes to create surfaces with low friction and low adsorption of biological molecules and is interested in biomimetic synthetic polymers. On the composites side, the group has developed and is exploiting an entirely new approach to the exfoliation of two dimensional materials such as graphite and boron nitride. This approach uses the insolubility of these materials to drive their spreading at the interface of immiscible solvents. Using this approach, his group has demonstrated the inexpensive formation of transparent conductive coatings and high strength, low-density conductive composites.