Ludwik Leibler

Ludwick Leibler, (born 1951 in Warsaw, Poland) is a French physicist. He is Professor at École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI ParisTech), Research Director ("classe exceptionnelle") at CNRS and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Ludwik Leibler received his PhD in 1976 in Theoretical Physics from Warsaw University, and then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Collège de France in Paris under the direction of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. He is a researcher in Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) which he joined in Strasbourg then in Paris where he worked on theoretical and experimental aspects of polymer self-assembly and dynamics, interfaces, gels and charged polymers. From 1996 to 2003 he was the founding director of a joint laboratory between CNRS and chemical company Elf Atochem (later Arkema) which regrouped researchers from academia and industry. In 2001 he became professor of Soft Matter and Chemistry at École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles in Paris where his research interests include influence of molecular disorder on mesoscopic structure and properties of polymer materials, impact resistance, fracture and adhesion, design of stimuli responsive materials and supramolecular chemistry. He is the inventor of a new class of smart rubber. In recent times he developed the vitrimers.
Dr. Leibler is a foreign associate of the National Academy of Engineering, recipient of CNRS Silver Medal, France IBM Prize in Material Science, the Polymer Physics prize of the American Physical Society (2006), the Polymer Chemistry Award of the American Chemical Society (2007) and the European Inventor Award (2015) for the invention of vitrimers.