Harm-Anton Klok is Full Professor at the Institutes of Materials and Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) (Lausanne,Switzerland). He studied chemical technology at the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands) from 1989 to 1993 and received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Ulm (Germany) after working with Martin Möller. After postdoctoral research with David N. Reinhoudt (University of Twente) and Samuel I. Stupp (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA), he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Mainz, Germany) in early 1999 as a project leader in the group of Klaus Müllen. In November 2002, he was appointed to the faculty of EPFL. Since 2012 he is Director of the Institute of Materials (~ Department Head) and also directs the Molecular and Hybrid Materials Characterization Center at EPFL.

His research interests include polymer surface and interface science, polymer nanomedicine and polymer synthesis and functionalization.

Harm-Anton Klok is recipient of the Arthur K. Doolittle Award of the American Chemical Society (2007) and is Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society journal Biomacromolecules and serves or has served on the editorial advisory board of Eur. Polym. J., J. Polym. Sci. A: Polym. Chem., Macromolecules, ACS Macro Letters as well as Macromol. Rapid Commun. and Macromol. Bioscience. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux (France) and the University of Massachusetts/Amherst (USA), is a Chair Professor at the College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Soochow University (Suzhou, China), guest professor at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun (China), Shanghai University (Shanghai, China) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and was awarded a Chinese Academy of Sciences visiting professorship for senior international scientists (Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing).

Representative Publications

[1] R. Barbey, L. Lavanant, D. Paripovic, N. Schüwer, C. Sugnaux, S. Tugulu, H.A. Klok, Polymer brushes via surface-initiated controlled radical polymerization: synthesis, characterization, properties and applications, Chem. Rev. 109 (2009) 5437-5527.

[2] S. Desseaux, H.A. Klok, Temperature-controlled masking/unmasking of cell-adhesive cues with poly(ethylene glycol) methacrylate based brushes, Biomacromolecules 15 (2014) 3859-3865.

[3] S. Desseaux, H.A. Klok, Fibroblast adhesion on ECM-derived peptide modified poly(2- hydroxyethyl methacrylate) brushes: ligand co-presentation and 3D-localization, Biomaterials 44 (2015) 24-35.

[4] M. Danial, H.A. Klok, Polymeric anti-HIV therapeutics, Macromol. Biosci. 15 (2015) 9-35.

[5] H.A. Klok, J. Genzer, Expanding the polymer mechanochemistry toolbox through surface-initiated polymerization, ACS Macro Lett. 4 (2015) 636-639.

[6] K.A. Günay, H.A. Klok, Identification of soft matter binding peptide ligands using phage display, Bioconjug. Chem. 26 (2015) 2002-2015.