Paulina obtained her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESO, Guadalajara, Mexico). She then worked in Mexico for five years before moving to the United States to pursue a PhD. From 2003 to 2005, she worked at SIG Beverage Services Mexico as an account manager (technical sales for the beverage industry). In 2005, she joined Hilasal Mexicana, a textile company, as a development engineer. Her responsibilities included formulation and process design and testing of new products in the development laboratory and dyeing and finishing areas. Finally, before starting her graduate studies, Paulina worked in Professor Paul Nealey’s group to obtain experience in a research environment.
In the fall of 2009, Paulina joined the chemical engineering graduate program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. After two years, she moved to Leuven, Belgium, as part of collaboration between the Nealey group and IMEC. During this time, she obtained a master’s degree from University of Wisconsin and became a graduate student of the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. During her time in Belgium, she also got a graduate degree in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Paulina got her PhD from the Institute for Molecular Engineering (now the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering) in June 2014 and became the first-ever engineering graduate from the University of Chicago. After graduation, she returned to Belgium and joined IMEC as a research engineer.
Paulina’s research is focused on identifying the primary parameters that impact defectivity in a chemo-epitaxy flow for directed self-assembly (DSA) of block copolymers (BCP) and to identify whether there is a fundamental lower limit for defectivity in DSA. In order to do that, she started an internship at IMEC (Belgium), where the first step of her work was the implementation of the flow on a 300mm wafer process in a clean room environment. Since then, she has studied the impact of materials and processing conditions on DSA. At the same time, defectivity of the thus obtained processes has been determined.
The implemented flow allows the fine-tuning of the process conditions and provides chemically nano-patterned substrates with well-defined geometry and chemistry. Using a BCP with natural periodicity of 28nm assembled on 84nm pitch pre-patterns, high degrees of perfection are achieved across the 300mm samples while obtaining 3X frequency multiplication. Using this setup, Paulina’s work includes the analysis of the effect of the boundary conditions in the formation of defects related to the chemical patterns (chemistry and geometry) and the BCP (annealing conditions and film thickness effects).
The Role of Water Volume Fraction on Water Adsorption in Anion Exchange Membranes
Gervasio Zaldivar, Ruilin Dong, Joan M Montes de Oca, Ge Sun, Riccardo Alessandri, Christopher G Arges, Shrayesh N Patel, Paul F Nealey, Juan J de Pablo, Macromolecules, 2025
Role of Crosslinking and Backbone Segmental Dynamics on Ion Transport in Hydrated Anion-Conducting Polyelectrolytes
Zhongyang Wang, Kai Wang, Christopher Eom, Yuxi Chen, Ge Sun, Mincheol Kim, Joan M Montes de Oca, Dongyue Liang, Kushal Bagchi, Shrayesh N Patel, Juan J de Pablo, Paul F Nealey, Advanced Functional Materials, 2025
IEC-Independent Coupling between Water Uptake and Ionic Conductivity in Anion-Conducting Polymer Films
Joan M Montes de Oca, Ruilin Dong, Gervasio Zaldivar, Ge Sun, Zhongyang Wang, Shrayesh N Patel, Paul F Nealey, Juan J de Pablo, Macromolecules, 2025
Water-mediated ion transport in an anion exchange membrane
Zhongyang Wang, Ge Sun, Nicholas HC Lewis, Mrinmay Mandal, Abhishek Sharma, Mincheol Kim, Joan M Montes de Oca, Kai Wang, Aaron Taggart, Alex B Martinson, Paul A Kohl, Andrei Tokmakoff, Shrayesh N Patel, Paul F Nealey, Juan J de Pablo. Nature Communications. 2025.
Directed self-assembly of block copolymer films on atomically-thin graphene chemical patterns
Chang, TH; Xiong, SS; Jacobberger, RM; Mikael, S; Suh, HS; Liu, CC; Geng, DL; Wang, XD; Arnold, MS; Ma, ZQ; Nealey, PF. Directed self-assembly of block copolymer films on atomically-thin graphene chemical patterns. Scientific Reports. 2016. Vol. 6, Pg. 31407.
Directed self-assembly of high-chi block copolymer for nano fabrication of bit patterned media via s
Xiong, S. S. Chapuis, Y. A. Wan, L. Gao, H. Li, X. Ruiz, R. Nealey, P. F.. Directed self-assembly of high-chi block copolymer for nano fabrication of bit patterned media via s. Nanotechnology. 2016. Vol. 27, Pg. 415601.
Directed Self-Assembly of Triblock Copolymer on Chemical Patterns for Sub-10-nm Nanofabrication via
Xiong, SS; Wan, L; Ishida, Y; Chapuis, YA; Craig, GSW; Ruiz, R; Nealey, PF. Directed Self-Assembly of Triblock Copolymer on Chemical Patterns for Sub-10-nm Nanofabrication via. ACS Nano. 2016. Vol. 10, Pg. 7855–7865.
Roadmap on optical metamaterials
Urbas, A. M. Jacob, Z. Dal Negro, L. Engheta, N. Boardman, A. D. Egan, P. Khanikaev, A. B. Menon, V. Ferrera, M. Kinsey, N. DeVault, C. Kim, J. Shalaev, V. Boltasseva, A. Valentine, J. Pfeiffer, C. Grbic, A. Narimanov, E. Zhu, L. X. Fan, S. H. Alu, A. Poutrina, E. Litchinitser, N. M. Noginov, M. A. MacDonald, K. F. Plum, E. Liu, X. Y. Nealey, P. F. Kagan, C. R. Murray, C. B. Pawlak, D. A. Smolyaninov, I. I. Smolyaninova, V. N. Chanda, D.. Roadmap on optical metamaterials. Journal of Optics. Vol. 18, Pg. 093005.
Post-directed-self-assembly membrane fabrication for in situ analysis of block copolymer structures
J Ren, L E Ocola, R Divan, D A Czaplewski, T Segal-Peretz, S Xiong, R J Kline, C G Arges and P F Nealey. Post-directed-self-assembly membrane fabrication for in situ analysis of block copolymer structures. Nanotechnology. 2016. Vol. 27, Pg. 435303.