John Badding received his B.S. from Manhattan College in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of California - Berkely in 1989.  He has been a Professor of Chemistry at the Pennsylvania State University since 1991. His research focuses on several areas of inorganic and polymeric materials chemistry, including optoelectronic materials and metamaterials, carbon nanomaterials, thermoelectric materials, chemical and physical phenomena in microscale and nanoscale capillaries and orifices, biomedical materials, and polymer nanofibers.