Christoph Weder is Professor of Polymer Chemistry and Materials and Director of the Adolphe Merkle Institute (AMI) at the Uni¬ve¬rsi¬ty of Fribourg, Switzerland. Chris was trained in chemistry and materials science at ETH Zurich, before he joined the MIT as a postdoc. After a Habilitation at ETH he held a faculty position at Case Western Reserve University for nearly a decade, before joining the AMI in 2009. From 2014 to 2020 Chris served as founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research Bio-Inspired Materials. Chris’ main research interests are the design, synthesis and investigation of novel functional poly¬mers, in particular stimuli-responsive polymers, bio-inspired materials, supramolecular systems, and polymer nano¬¬composites. He has mentored about 20 MS and 55 PhD students and some 40 postdoctoral researchers. He is co-author of about 300 research papers and co-inventor of twenty patent families. He was involved in one start-up company and has made contributions to several commercialized technologies. Chris is an Associate Editor of ACS Macro Letters, member of the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Polymer Chemistry