Leire Sangroniz Agudo

Dr. Leire Sangroniz Agudo is a La Caixa Junior Leader Postdoctoral Fellow and Emakiker Fellow at POLYMAT, and a Ramón y Cajal awardee at POLYMAT and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She earned her BSc in Chemistry (2014) and MSc in Chemistry and Polymers (2015) from UPV/EHU, where she also obtained her PhD in 2019 with Prof. A. Santamaria and Prof. A.J. Müller with the support of a competitive individual FPU fellowship at national level. In 2020, she was awarded the highest-ranked postdoctoral fellowship from the Basque Government, enabling her to join Prof. Marc A. Hillmyer's group at the University of Minnesota and become part of the Center for Sustainable Polymers (CSP). In 2023, she continued her postdoctoral research at the University of Genoa (Italy) joining the group of Prof. Dario Cavallo with a Margarita Salas Fellowship. After that period, she returned to POLYMAT in 2024 to implement her research line. Her scientific achievements have been recognized through several prestigious awards, including the Iberian Award for the Most Distinguished PhD Thesis in Rheology (2019–2021), jointly presented by the Spanish Rheology Group and the Portuguese Society of Rheology (2022), the Extraordinary PhD Thesis Award from UPV/EHU (2022) and CAF-Elhuyar Award (2020). More recently, she received the European Polymer Federation Future Faculty and Researchers Award (2025) and the JTACC+V4 Young Scientist Award (2025) for her outstanding contributions to polymer science. Her research focuses on developing next-generation semicrystalline sustainable polymers by replacing conventional petroleum-based materials with renewable, biodegradable, and chemically recyclable alternatives. Her research aims to establish fundamental structure–property relationships governing polymer crystallization and processing to enable the rational design of high-performance sustainable polymeric materials.