Rodney D. Priestley is the Vice Dean of Innovation at Princeton University. He is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Associate Director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials. He obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2008. He completed a NSF/ Chateaubriand postdoctoral fellowship at École Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris. His research interests include polymer glasses, nanoconfined polymer dynamics, polymer thin film and nanoparticle formation, MAPLE and responsive polymers. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Quadrant Award, ACS New Investigator Grant, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Grant, NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR YIP, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, AICHE MSED Owens Corning Early Career Award; and was named to The Root 100 list of most influential African Americans and World Economic Forum Young Global Scientists.