Full Name
Helen Tran, Ph.D.
Job Title
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry & Cross-appointed in the Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry
Institution
University of Toronto
Location
Toronto, ON
Description
Dr. Tran is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Chemistry (co-appointed in the Department of Chemical Engineering). Team Tran leverages the rich palette of polymer chemistry to design new materials encoded with information for self-assembly, degradability, and electronic transport. The creation of these multifunctional materials and an understanding of how they are utilized to construct next-generation electronics will serve as a platform to address previously inaccessible challenges impacting health and sustainability. Before coming to the University of Toronto, Dr. Tran was an Intelligence Community postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University under the mentorship of Prof. Zhenan Bao, where she worked on stretchable and biodegradable electronics. She completed her PhD in Chemistry at Columbia University in 2016 with Prof. Luis Campos, broadly investigating hierarchical ordering and periodic patterning in block copolymer systems. She received her BS in Chemistry with a minor in Chemical Engineering from the University of California—Berkeley in 2009, conducting undergraduate research with Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu (Electrical Engineering). In the two subsequent years, Dr. Tran was a post-baccalaureate fellow in Dr. Ronald Zuckermann’s research group at the Molecular Foundry at Berkeley National Labs, exploring the self-assembly of biomimetic polymers into 2D nanosheets.
Helen Tran, Ph.D.