Dr. Vibha Kalra will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the fall of 2010 after gaining some Industrial Research Experience in polymer/polymer composite materials during the 2009-2010 academic year. Dr. Kalra received a Bachelor of Technology in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute Of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India in 2004 and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University in 2009, with a minor in Materials Science and Engineering.

At Drexel, Dr. Kalra will be both teaching and leading a research group. Her research interests stem from her focus at Cornell, which was on the design and fabrication of advanced nanomaterials and on the study of polymer nanocomposites under deformation using molecular simulations. Her thesis was titled “Controlling Nanoparticle Location in Block Copolymers Using External Fields: Simulations and Experiments”.