Bio-bibliography

USA

Geoffrey W. Coates and Marc A. Hillmyer

2026 Balzan Prize for Biodegradable Polymers from Renewable Sources

For their pioneering and collaborative development of sustainable polymers, combining molecular design and catalysis to transform renewable feedstocks and recovered carbon dioxide into high-performance, degradable, and recyclable materials, and for advancing these discoveries from fundamental science to industrial materials and technologies.<br />

Geoffrey William Coates is an American chemist born in 1966 in Evansville, Indiana USA.

He earned his chemistry degree from Wabash College in 1989 and his PhD in organic chemistry from Stanford University in 1994. At Stanford University he worked with Robert M. Waymouth as a Hertz Fellow. Coates then was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Robert H. Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology.

In 1997, Coates joined the faculty of Cornell University where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001, and to Professor in 2002. Since 2008 he has been Tisch University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and his teaching and research interests involve science at the interface of organic, inorganic, and materials chemistry.

Coates is an associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and is leading the launch of the Cornell Institute for Chemical Innovation at Cornell University in the Fall of 2026.

Marc Andrew Hillmyer is an American citizen born in Turkey in 1967.

He received his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Florida in 1989 and his Doctorate in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1994.

He then moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota as a postdoctoral research associate in the group of Professor Frank Bates. In 1997 Hillmyer joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Minnesota where he is currently the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Chemistry and leads a research group focused on the synthesis and self-assembly of functional and sustainable polymers.

In addition to his teaching and research responsibilities, he is currently the editor-in-chief of Macromolecules and the director of the Center for Sustaina-ble Polymers at the University of Minnesota.

Among their most important publications, including key joint works:

Rieth, L. R., Moore, D. R., Lobkovsky, E. B. and Coates, G. W. (2002), “Single-Site Beta-Diiminate Zinc Catalysts for the Ring-Opening Polymerization of Beta-Butyrolactone and Beta-Valerolactone to Poly(3-Hydroxyalkanoates)”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 124, 15239-15248.

Cohen, C. T., Chu, T., Coates, G. W. (2005) “Cobalt Catalysts for the Alternating Copolymerization of Propylene Oxide and Carbon Dioxide: Combining High Activity and Selectivity”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 127, 10869-10878.

Dunn, E. W., Coates, G. W. (2010) “Carbonylative Polymerization of Propylene Oxide: A Multicatalytic Approach to the Synthesis of Poly(3-Hydroxybu-tyrate)”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 132, 11412-11413.

Xiong, M., Schneiderman, D. K., Bates, F. S., Hillmyer, M. A. and Zhang, K. (2014), “Scalable Production of Mechanically Tunable Block Polymers from Sugar”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 111, 8357-8362. Brutman, J. P., Delgado, P. A. and Hillmyer, M. A. (2014), “Polylactide Vitrimers”,

ACS Macro Letters, 3, 607-610.

Schneiderman, D. K., Vanderlaan, M. E., Mannion, A. M., Panthani, T. R., Batiste,

D. C., Wang, J. Z., Bates, F. S., Macosko, C. W. and Hillmyer, M. A. (2016), “Chem-ically Recyclable Biobased Polyurethanes”, ACS Macro Letters, 5, 515-518.

De Hoe, G. X., Zumstein, M. T., Tiegs, B. J., Brutman, J. P., McNeill, K., Sander, M., Coates, G. W. and Hillmyer, M. A. (2018), “Sustainable Polyester Elasto-mers from Lactones: Synthesis, Properties, and Enzymatic Hydrolyzability”, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 140, 963-973.

Snyder, R. L., Lidston, C. A. L., De Hoe, G. X., Parvulescu, M. J. S., Hillmyer, M.

A. and Coates, G. W. (2020), “Mechanically Robust and Reprocessable Imine Exchange Networks from Modular Polyester Pre-Polymers”, Polymer Chem-istry, 11, 5346-5355.