Dr. Kelly M. Schultz is an Associate Professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University where she moved in January 2024. She was previously in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. She obtained her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northeastern University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with Professor Eric Furst from the University of Delaware in 2011 as a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. While at Delaware, she participated in the American Chemical Society Excellence in Graduate Polymers Research Symposium and was selected as the Fraser and Shirley Russell Teaching Fellow. Following her PhD, she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado at Boulder working in the laboratory of Professor Kristi Anseth. As a postdoc, she was invited to participate in the Distinguished Young Scholars Summer Seminar Series at the University of Washington. She began her position as Assistant Professor at Lehigh University in 2013, was selected to be a P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor from 2016 – 2018 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019. Dr. Schultz was named one of TA Instruments Distinguished Young Rheologists (2014), selected to attend the Frontiers of Engineering program hosted by the National Academy of Engineering (2016), awarded a NSF CAREER award in 2018 and received the Lehigh University Libsch Early Career Research Award (2019), P.C. Rossin College of Engineering & Applied Science Excellence in Research Scholarship & Leadership Award (2020) and P.C. Rossin College of Engineering & Applied Science Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award (2023). She is a consulting editor of AIChE Journal and an associate editor for Physics of Fluids. Dr. Schultz and her research group study emerging hydrogel materials developed for biological applications, such as wound healing, tissue regeneration and drug delivery. Of particular interest is the development of bulk and microrheological techniques that measure how 3D encapsulated human mesenchymal stem cells degrade and remodel synthetic hydrogel scaffolds during motility.

Currently seeking undergraduate researchers

Dr. Shiqin He (PhD, ’23) – Zoetis Pharmaceuticals
Dr. John A. McGlynn (PhD, ’22) – Merck
Dr. Nan Wu (PhD, ’21) – Bristol Myers Squibb
Dr. Maryam Daviran (PhD, ’20) – Merck
Dr. Matthew D. Wehrman (PhD, ’18) – IBM, previously: GlobalFoundries, Intel
Michelle Mazzeo (MS, ’18) – Regeneron
Lu Liu (MS, ’18) – Colgate
Francisco Escobar IV (ME, ’15)