2025 Distinguished Alumni Award: Matthew Tirrell

Matthew Tirrell PhD '77 is the recipient of the 2025 College of Natural Sciences (CNS) Distinguished Alumni Award.  

"I was very pleased and surprised to learn of my receipt of the UMass College of Natural Sciences Alumni Award," expressed Tirrell. "It means a lot to me, as my graduate school years there really were influential in determining the course of my career."   

Tirrell earned his BS in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 1973, followed by a PhD from the College of Natural Science's Department of Polymer Science and Engineering (PSE) in 1977. His early training laid the foundation for a career at the intersection of chemical engineering, polymer science, and molecular engineering.   

Tirrell began his academic career at the University of Minnesota. Among other notable positions, he served as the Shell Distinguished Chair in Chemical Engineering (1986-1991) and later the Earl E. Bakken Professor of Biomedical Engineering (1993-1997). His leadership extended beyond the classroom, as director of the Biomedical Engineering Institute (1995-1997) and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (1995-1999).  

In 1999, Tirrell joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he was appointed the Richard A. Auhll Professor and Dean of the College of Engineering, through which his teaching and leadership bolstered UCSB's standing in the fields of chemical engineering, materials, and biomolecular science.  

Tirrell next joined the University of California, Berkeley as the Arnold and Barbara Silverman Professor and Chair of the Department of Bioengineering, with additional appointments in materials science and engineering, as well as chemical and biomolecular engineering. He also served as a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  

In 2011, Tirrell became the Pritzker Director and Dean of the Faculty for the University of Chicago (UChicago)'s Institute for Molecular Engineering (2011-2019), later serving as dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (2019-2023). He continues at UChicago as the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor. Concurrently, he has held the positions of senior scientist and deputy laboratory director for science at Argonne National Laboratory (administered by UChicago).  

"There is an interesting parallel between my time at UMass and my time at UChicago," Tirrell reflected. "When I came to UMass as a first year PhD student in 1973, the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering had just been established a few years before. It was among the first and most prominent materials science departments to focus entirely on polymeric materials.   

"There was a building and a field-defining element to what was going on at UMass that I reflected on often when I came to UChicago almost forty years later. The most important aspect of that experience was that UMass built the department by first hiring outstanding field leaders across the spectrum of polymer science; hiring bright assistant professors came a few years later. That's exactly how we built the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering based on the lessons I saw in action as a PSE student at UMass."  

Michael A. Fox, PhD, Dean of the College of Natural Sciences, notes Tirrell's impact on various fields of science: "Over four decades in higher education, Dr. Tirrell has not only been a scientific pioneer in the fields of polymer and materials sciences, he has been a visionary leader for the field. He has chartered new fields in molecular engineering and led several units at different institutions to earn top national and global rankings in their respective fields. His contributions are simply unparalleled, and we are incredibly proud to call him an alumnus of our Polymer Science and Engineering program."