John Ugelstad
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John Ugelstad (March 31, 1921 - April 3, 1997) was a pioneering scientist within the fields of polymer and colloid chemistry.
[edit] Education
In 1948, Ugelstad graduated from Department of Chemistry at NTH in Trondheim (today: Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU).
In the Netherlands, Ugelstad was encouraged to combine his work at Philips R&D lab in Eindhoven with Ph.D. studies, and in 1955 he defended his thesis Kinetic Studies of the Reactions between Amides and Formaldehyde at the University of Leiden.
[edit] Research
In 1956 he was appointed associate professor at Department of Industrial Chemistry at NTH. This would be his place of work for the rest of his life, and he was promoted to full professor in 1967. At NTH, Ugelstad worked closely with SINTEF Chemistry and industrial companies, the most important being Dyno Industries, Norsk Hydro, DuPont and Rohm & Haas. One area of interest was the solvent effect on kinetics of organic and polymeric reactions. In collaboration with Norsk Hydro, he contributed to the development of mathematical models and new methods for production of PVC.
During the 1970s, professor Ugelstad continued to work with emulsion polymerization and related topics. He had already gained an international reputation, and in many ways this work was the foundation of his greatest scientific achievement - the preparation of large monodisperse polymer beads in 1977. The basic idea for this invention was a two-step swelling procedure. Small "activated" polymer particles are dispersed in water, and these will adsorb slightly water-soluble organic compounds and reach a volume more than 1000 times their own volume. Interesting areas of application are chromatography, models in physical studies, optical storage and calibration of instruments.
Further developments resulted in preparation of monodisperse paramagnetic beads in 1981(today known as Dynabeads, available from Invitrogen). These may be prepared by dispersing porous beads covered with oxidative groups at the exterior and interior surfaces in an aqueous solution of Fe2+ containing salts. The ions react with the oxidative groups and form fine grains of magnetic oxides throughout the beads, resulting in "supermagnetic" beads, in other words, the beads are only magnetic in a magnetic field. Many applications of these beads lie within immunology, cellular biology, microbiology, molecular biology, medical diagnostics and DNA technology.
Ugelstad was working actively in his field until his death in 1997. His pioneering work had resulted in more than 200 publications and several patents.
