Stuart J. Rowan (born 1969) is a Scottish chemist.
Early life and education Rowan was born in Edinburgh on October 16, 1969, and raised in Troon, South Ayrshire. He completed a Bachelor of Science in chemistry at the University of Glasgow.
Rowan earned his doctorate from the Chemistry Department at the University of Glasgow under the direction of David D. MacNicol in 1994 working on Supramolecular Crystal Engineering. (Thesis)
In late 1994, he began postdoctoral working for Jeremy Sanders in the Chemistry Department at the University of Cambridge working on dynamic covalent libraries.(refs: Rowan, S.J.; Hamilton, D.G.; Brady, P.A.; Sanders, J.K.M. Automated Recognition, Sorting and Covalent Self-Assembly by Predisposed Building Blocks in a Mixture J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1997, 119, 2578–2579. Rowan, S.J.; Sanders, J.K.M. Building Thermodynamic Combinatorial Libraries of Quinine Macrocylces Chem. Commun. 1997, 1407–1408.)
Career In 1998, Rowan left the United Kingdom to continue his postdoctoral studies with Nobel Laureate Sir J. Fraser Stoddart at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked on using dynamic covalent chemistry in the synthesis of interlocked molecules.(ref Rowan, S.J.; Stoddart, J.F. Thermodynamic Template-Directed Synthesis of Dynamic Rotaxanes by Imine Exchange Org. Lett. 1999, 1, 1913-1916.) He also developed Surrogate phosphonium stoppers for rotaxanes that could be exchanged using Wittig chemistry.(ref Rowan, S.J.; Stoddart, J.F. Precision Molecular Grafting: Exchanging Surrogate Stoppers in Rotaxanes J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2000, 122, 164-165.)
In 1999, he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2005, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure and became a Full Professor in 2008. In 2009, he was named the Kent Hale Smith Professor of Engineering. There he starting working supramolecular materials using nucleobases (Sivakova, S.; Bohnsack, D.A.; Suwanmala, P.; Mackay, M.E.; Rowan, S.J. Utilization of a Combination of Weak Hydrogen Bonding Interactions and Phase Segregation to Yield Highly Thermo-Sensitive Supramolecular Polymers J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2005, 127, 18202-18211. Buerkle, L.E.; von Recum, H.A.; Rowan S.J. Toward Potential New Supramolecular Tissue Engineering Scaffolds Based on Guanosine Derivatives Chem. Sci. 2012, 3, 564-572.) and pi-pi interactions,(with Howard Colquhoun and Wayne Hayes) (ref: Burattini, S.; Greenland, B.W.; Merino D.H., Weng, W.; Seppala, J.; Colquhoun, H.M.; Hayes, W.; Mackay, M.E.; Hamley, I.W.; Rowan S.J. A healable supramolecular polymer blend based on aromatic π-π stacking and hydrogen bonding interactions J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132, 12051-12058) metallosupramolecular polymers (Beck, J.B.; Rowan, S.J. Multi-Stimuli, Multi-Responsive Metallo-Supramolecular Polymers, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2003, 125, 13922-13923.; Burnworth, M.; Tang, L.; Kumpfer, J.R., Duncan, A. J., Beyer, F.L.; Fiore, G.L.; Rowan S.J.; Weder, C. Optically Healable Supramolecular Polymers Nature 2011, 472, 334-337. DOI: 10.1038/nature09963.), and mechanically adaptive cellulose nanocrystal composites (with Christoph Weder).(ref: Capadona, J.R.; Shanmuganathan, K.; Tyler D.J.; Rowan S.J.; Weder, C. Stimuli-Responsive Polymer Nanocomposites Inspired by the Sea Cucumber Dermis Science 2008, 319, 1370-1374. DOI: 10.1126/science.1153307.) During his time at CWRU he was awarded the NSF CAREER Award, the Morley Medal from the Cleveland Section of the American Chemical Society in 2014 (https://www.acscleveland.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Morley_winners_2025.pdf) and the Herman Mark Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society in 2015.(https://polyacs.org/marks-scholar-awards/)
In 2016, Rowan joined The University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering as well as that university's Department of Chemistry, and accepted an appointment as the Barry L. MacLean Professor for Molecular Engineering Innovation and Enterprise in 2018. Rowan also holds a staff scientist position at the Argonne National Laboratory.
In June 2026, Rowan also was named Director of the Energy Technologies initiative, a partnership between the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth and the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME)https://pme.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/energy-technologies-initiative-receive-new-leadership.
At the University of Chicago, his research group have continued to carry out the exploration of dynamic covalent networks using primarily disulfide bonds and room temperature dynamic, catalyst free thia-Michael bonds. His group has pioneered the use of dynamic covalent networks to access pluripotent plastics.(Boynton, N.R.; Dennis, J.M.; Dolinski, N.D.; Lindberg, C.A.; Kotula, A.P.; Grocke, G.L.; Vivod, S.L.; Lenhart, J.L.; Patel, S.N.; Rowan, S.J. Toward pluripotent materials through tempering of dynamic covalent polymer networks Science 2024, 383, 545-551. DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5009) With Henrich Jaegar his group has developed dynamic covalent dense suspensions that exhibit time dependent rheopectic behavior.(Kim, H.; Livermore, S.M.; Rowan, S.J.; Jaeger, H.M. Dense suspensions as trainable rheological metafluids Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2025 122, e2509525122. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2509525122; Kim, H.; van der Naald, M.; Dolinski, N.D.; Rowan, S.J.; Jaegar, H.M. Dynamic-bond-induced Sticky Friction Tailors Non-Newtonian Rheology Soft Matter 2023, 19, 6797-6804. DOI: 10.1039/D3SM00479A)
His group have also developed the first synthetic route to poly[n]catenanes (Wu, Q.; Lang, X.; Rauscher, P.M.; Wojtecki, R.J.; de Pablo, J.J.; Hore, M.J.A.; Rowan, S.J. Poly[n]catenanes: Synthesis of molecular interlocked chains Science, 2017, 358, 1434-1439. DOI: 10.1126/science.aap7675.) and slide ring polycatenanes (Hart, L.F.; Lenart, W.R.; Hertzog, J.E.; Oh, J.; Turner, W.R.; Dennis, J.M.; Rowan, S.J. Doubly-Threaded Slide-Ring Polycatenane Networks J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023, 145, 12315–12323. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.3c02837) prepared biographene from biowaste (Hui, J.; You, H.; Van Beek, A.; Zhang, J.; Elahi, A.; Downing, J.R.; Chaney, L.E.; Lee, D.; Ainsworth, E.A. Chaudhuri, S.; Dunn, J.B.; Chen, W.; Rowan, S.J.; Hersam, M.C. Sustainable Production of Biomass-Derived Graphite and Graphene Conductive Inks from Biochar Small, 2024, 2406669. DOI 10.1002/smll.202406669.), has programs working on all organic batteries (Grocke, G.L.; Zhang, H.; Kopfinger, S.S.; Patel, S.N.; Rowan, S.J. Synthesis and characterization of redox-responsive disulfide-crosslinked polymer particles for energy storage applications, ACS Macro Lett. 2021, 10, 1637–1642. DOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.1c00682; Alessandri, R.; Li, C.-H.; Keating, S.; Mohanty, K.T.; Peng, A.; Lutkenhaus, J.L.; Rowan, S.J.; Tabor, D.P.; de Pablo, J.J. Structural, Ionic, and Electronic Properties of Solid-State Phthalimide-Containing Polymers for All-Organic Batteries J. Am. Chem. Soc. Au 2024, 4, 2300-2311. DOI: 10.1021/jacsau.4c00276) and with Jeff Hubbel has developed stimuli-responsive polymer-based nanoparticles can encapsulate proteins and RNA but simply warming to room temperature.(Hossainy, S.; Kang, S.; Emiliano Gómez Medellín, J.; Alpar, A.T.; Refvik, K.C.; Ma, Y.; Vuong, I.; Chang, K.; Wang, T.; Solanki, A.; Rowan, S.J.; Hubbell, J.A. Thermoreversibly Assembled Polymersomes for Highly Efficient Loading, Processing, and Delivery of Protein and siRNA Biologics Nature Bioeng. 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41551-025-01469-7)
Rowan's work has been shared on the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering https://pme.uchicago.edu website and elsewhere: "Shape-shifting particles let scientists control how fluids flow",https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/shape-shifting-particles-let-scientists-control-how-fluids-flow "Going green with graphite: Researchers turn plant waste into high-tech material",https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/going-green-graphite-researchers-turn-plant-waste-high-tech-material and "'Pluripotent' plastic: from one starting polymer, many materials."https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/pluripotent-plastic-one-starting-polymer-many-materials In 2024, his work was written about in the New York Times: "A Shape-Shifting Plastic With a Flexible Future."
Rowan is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS),(Elected in 2024 https://royalsociety.org/people/stuart-rowan-36799/) Fellow of the American Chemical Society (Elected 2018 https://cen.acs.org/acs-news/programs/2018-ACS-Fellows/96/i29) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). Rowan is the founding deputy editor of the journal ACS Macro Letters, and succeeded Timothy P. Lodge as editor in chief in 2018.
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