Rate My Professor Nicolas Alvarez

Nicolas J. Alvarez is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Drexel University. He earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida in 2006 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Following his doctorate, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Danish Polymer Center at the Technical University of Denmark from 2011 to 2014 before joining Drexel University as an Assistant Professor in 2014.

His research focuses on polymer dynamics, interfacial rheology, surfactant transport to fluid and solid interfaces, extensional rheology of polymer composites, aqueous lubrication, and interfacial instabilities. Alvarez leads the Alvarez Research Group and has received several academic distinctions, including the AIChE Delaware Valley Section Outstanding Faculty Award in 2019, the AIChE Fluid Dynamics First Place Postdoctoral Poster Award in 2012, the Ken Meyer Award for Excellence in Graduate Research in 2011, the AIChE Fluid Dynamics First Place Graduate Student Poster Award in 2010, the Geoffrey D. Parfitt Memorial Award in 2010, the Mark Dennis Karl Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in 2010, and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in 2006. Key publications include works on creep measurements of branched polymers in Physical Review Letters (2013), extensional rheology of entangled polystyrene solutions in ACS Macro Letters (2013), and multiple studies on surfactant and polymer interfacial dynamics in Langmuir and Journal of Colloid and Interface Science between 2009 and 2012. He has been cited over 3,900 times according to Google Scholar for contributions in polymer dynamics, interfacial rheology, and surfactant transport.