André van der Vlies received his master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH), Switzerland, on the understanding of the sulfidation reaction of tungsten oxides using different spectroscopic techniques. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Professor Jeffrey Hubbell at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and worked on developing polymeric materials for use as synthetic vaccines and drug delivery applications. He worked in the Department of Applied Chemistry at Osaka University, Japan, as a research fellow on gasotransmitter-releasing polymeric micelles for drug delivery applications before moving to Kansas State University. At Kansas State University, he developed a high-throughput system to retrieve and isolate bacteria from microwell arrays using photodegradable hydrogel materials. In 2020, he joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State as an assistant research professor and is currently working on polymer-based solar cells.
Current research focuses on the design and synthesis of conjugated polymers and non-fullerene acceptors for organic solar cells.