Rachel A. Segalman

Segalman was recruited to UCSB in 2014 as the Kramer Professor of Materials in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Materials. The same year she was also appointed as the chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Warren and Katherine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering. She is the associated director of the Center for Materials for Water Energy System, a joint center between UCSB, LBL, and UT funded by the Department of Energy.

In 2004 Segalman was appointed as the Charles Wilke Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of California, Berkeley, and a Faculty Research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) Materials Science Division. In 2013 she was appointed as the acting director of LBL Materials Science Division.

Segalman studied chemical engineering at University of Texas at Austin (UT). She graduate with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1998. She moved UCSB for her graduate studies, where she received her Ph.D. in 2002. At UCSB she worked under the supervision of Edward J. Kramer. Her research thesis was on controlling long range order in block copolymer thin films. After completing her Ph.D., Segalman was a Chateaubriand postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Européenne de Chimie, Polymères et Matériaux working under Georges Hadziioannou.

Segalman was born in 1975 in Madison, Wisconsin. Her family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where as a high schooler she did research at Sandia National Laboratories. She is a third generation female chemical scientist.