Video: Akron professor Puskas to receive Charles Goodyear Medal

PITTSBURGH—The ACS Rubber Division has chosen a professor from the University of Akron to receive its Charles Goodyear Medal, the highest honor given out by the technical organization.

Judit Puskas, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, was announced as the winner during the Rubber Division's International Elastomer Conference in Pittsburgh. She is the first woman to receive the award and she will accept the medal at the group's spring meeting next spring in Beachwood, Ohio.

Puskas received a doctorate in plastics and rubber technology in 1985 and a master's in organic and biochemical engineering in 1977 from the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary. Her advisers were Professors Ferenc Tudos and Tibor Kelen of Hungary, and Professor Joseph P. Kennedy, himself a Charles Goodyear medalist from the University of Akron. The arrangement was part of a collaboration between the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

She started her academic career in 1996. Before that she was involved in polymer research and development in the microelectronic, paint and rubber industries. Her current interests include the integration of breast reconstruction and cancer research; green polymer chemistry; biomimetic processes and biomaterials; living/controlled polymerizations; polymerization mechanisms and kinetics; thermoplastic elastomers and polymer structure/property relationships; and probing the polymer-bio interface.

Puskas has been published in more than 370 publications, is an inventor or co-inventor of 31 U.S. patents and applications, and has been chair or organizer of a number of international conferences. Puskas has been awarded her first National Institutes of Health grant—the first ever in the University of Akron's Department of Polymer Science—in 2010, and has had seven NSF Grants since 2005.

Awards she has received include: the 1999 Professional Engineers of Ontario (Canada) Medal in Research and Development; a 2000 Premier's Research Excellence Award; the 2004 Mercator Professorship Award from the DFG German Research Foundation; and the 2009 Chemistry of Thermoplastic Elastomers Award of the Rubber Division.

In 2014 she was named the Joseph M. Gingo Chair at the University of Akron. Her research now focuses on the integration of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment with breast reconstruction. She and her business partners received a Phase II SBIR grant from NSF to demonstrate the effectiveness of her polymeric diagnostic agents, in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic. Her Center of Advanced Elastomers for Healthcare, supported by the Rubber Division and the Breast Cancer Innovation Foundation, also received an NSF grant helping her commercialization efforts.

Puskas has raised more than $4 million for research in Canada, and move than $10 million overall since joining the University of Akron. As a co-inventor of the polymer used on the Taxus-brand coronary stent, Puskas helped the University of Akron generate more than $5 million in license fees.

The Charles Goodyear Medal perpetuates the memory of Charles Goodyear as the discoverer of the vulcanization of rubber by honoring individuals for outstanding invention, innovation or development that has resulted in a significant change or contribution to the nature of the rubber industry.