Bio

Junpeng was born and raised in a small town near Xi’an, China, where the Terracotta Army is located. He obtained his B.S. at University of Science and Technology of China in 2010. After that he went to Duke University to work on polymer mechanochemistry with Steve Craig, and obtained his PhD degree in chemistry in 2015. In his PhD studies, Junpeng has designed and synthesized a series of stress-responsive polymers; more importantly, he has quantified the force-induced reactivity and elucidated the mechanisms by applying the technique of single-molecule force spectroscopy to the systems. In 2016, after his PhD studies, he worked as a postdoc with Luping Yu at University of Chicago, where he designed and synthesized a series of porous conjugated polymers and assembled them as the cathode materials for lithium ion batteries. In early 2017, he moved to MIT and worked for Jeremiah Johnson as a postdoc. In the Johnson group, Junpeng has developed a method that allows for the quantification of different orders of cyclic defects in polymer networks and the method enables the accurate prediction of polymer network elasticity. In January 2019, Junpeng started his independent career in the Department of Polymer Science at the University of Akron.