Prof. em. Dr. Paul Smith

Paul Smith was born in 1951 the Netherlands, where he received academic degrees in chemical engineering and polymer science, culminating in a PhD in 1976 at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. After a post-doctoral fellowship at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, he joined the Central Laboratory of the Dutch chemical company DSM. In 1982 he became senior research chemist and research supervisor at the Central Research & Development Department at the Experimental Station of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, Inc. in Wilmington, Delaware, USA. Subsequently, he was appointed full Professor of Materials and Professor of Chemical & Nuclear Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, US, in the Materials Department and Department of Chemical & Nuclear Engineering. During his stay in Santa Barbara, he co-founded the high-tech company UNIAX Corporation, where he was Director of Research and chief scientist. In 1995 he became full Professor of Polymer Technology at the Department of Materials Science at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Professor Emeritus in 2016. During his tenure in Zürich, he co-founded the intellectual property company Omlidon Technologies, LLC, where he was President and CEO.

He has been an active member of a number of boards of international scientific journals, including "Polymer", the “Journal of Materials Chemistry” and “Macromolecules”.

Smith received various awards for his work in polymeric materials, i.e. the Gold Medal of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society, the Award for Distinguished Achievement from The Fiber Society, USA and two Fellowships from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science, and jointly with Prof. P. J. Lemstra, the Wallace H. Carothers Medal from The Textile Institute and the Qian Baojun Fiber Award of China. He was elected as Corresponding Member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, FRSC, of the United Kingdom.

His fields of research include processing of polymers materials, polymer phase behavior, high-performance polymer systems, electrically and optically active polymers. Paul Smith is co-author of approximately 250 scientific papers and book chapters and co-inventor of over 50 US-issued patents in the areas of high-performance polymers, orientation processes, conducting polymers and fluoropolymers.

Research of Smith and his co-workers resulted in 7 commercialized products, including Dyneema^® (“the world’s strongest fiber” - DSM), Irgaclear^® XT 386 (the most effective clarifier for transparent polymers - Ciba, now BASF), Moldflon^® (ElringKlinger Kunststofftechnik GmbH), as well as Polarisafe^® and Durasafe^® (resp. fiber security features in, and substrates for, among other products, past and current Swiss bank notes - lanqart).