UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor Rachel Segalman has been named the university’s new Vice Chancellor for Research (VCR), effective July 1. The announcement was made by Chancellor Henry T. Yang, marking the conclusion of a comprehensive national search led by a campus advisory committee co-chaired by materials professor Tresa Pollock and physics professor Claudio Campagnari.
"Our campus is delighted to welcome Professor Segalman as our next Vice Chancellor for Research. In this pivotal role, she will continue to ensure that research and creative endeavors at UC Santa Barbara are integrated with the educational and service missions of our university, and will build upon our campus's extraordinary momentum in advancing frontier scholarship, strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration, and expanding our impact from campus to global communities,” said Yang. “Professor Segalman's proven leadership and deep commitment to research excellence will be invaluable as we continue to secure competitive research funding and fuel discoveries and foster innovation that promote economic growth -- for the benefit of society and in support of our mission as a leading public research university."
In her new role, Segalman will serve as UCSB’s chief research officer, overseeing the Office of Research and guiding the campus’s expansive research enterprise. Her responsibilities include shaping the strategic direction of research across disciplines, advancing extramural funding efforts, supporting faculty and research teams, and fostering a collaborative, interdisciplinary research environment.
“I’m extremely excited to help the university explore new partnerships and funding mechanisms that will support the next generation of researchers and amplify the impact of our scholarship and creative work,” said Segalman, who holds the Edward Noble Kramer Distinguished Professorship in Chemical Engineering, Materials, and Chemistry & Biochemistry.
A UCSB alumna, Segalman earned her PhD in chemical engineering and returned to campus in 2014 after a decade on the faculty at UC Berkeley and as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she also served a term as interim director of the lab’s Materials Science Division.
Segalman assumes her new role during a period of growing uncertainty around federal research funding due to evolving policy landscapes. Despite these challenges, UCSB remains a national research powerhouse — during the 2023–24 academic year, the campus received $267.2 million in sponsored project awards, with 70 percent of them coming from federal sources.
“One of the things that I love most about the UCSB community is our desire to build bridges and connections between different research and creative endeavors, and how to make them into something new and meaningful out of these connections,” said Segalman. “Our interdisciplinary and collaborative culture is one of the main reasons I came back to UCSB, and it’s why I’m extremely excited to be the vice chancellor and get an opportunity to grow our university’s research in new ways.”
Segalman has served in numerous leadership roles at UCSB, including eight years as department chair. She co-chaired the Chancellor’s Task Force on the Training and Support of Doctoral and Postdoctoral Researchers and has helped shape national science policy through her work with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Dreyfus Foundation, the Materials Research Society, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and the National Laboratory system. Segalman has also spearheaded major initiatives and research centers, including the DoE-supported Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems (M-WET) and BioPACIFIC, a Materials Innovation Platform supported by the National Science Foundation.
"On behalf of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering, I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Professor Rachel Segalman on her appointment as UCSB's new Vice Chancellor for Research,” said Umesh Mishra, dean of The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering. “Her visionary leadership and groundbreaking contributions as a chemical engineer and materials scientist exemplify the excellence our campus strives for. We are proud to see one of our own step into this critical role, and we believe that her commitment to transdisciplinary collaboration and pursuit of excellence will ensure that impactful and leading-edge research continues to take place at UCSB.”
Nationally recognized for her research in soft materials and functional polymers, Segalman has significantly advanced the understanding of organic thermoelectrics and charge transport in polymer systems. She has pioneered connections between molecular structure and ionic/electronic conductivity in polymers — most recently demonstrating the potential of sequence-controlled polymers for high-resolution photolithography to make microchips.
Her accolades include election to the National Academy of Engineering, the Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Andreas Acrivos Award. She is also a fellow of the AIChE, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Segalman succeeds interim Vice Chancellor Scott Grafton, who stepped in following the departure of former VCR Joe Incandela, who retired after eight years in the position.
