Dr. Yuhang Huang, a 2025 U of T graduate, has been awarded the Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC)’s Macromolecular Science and Engineering Division (MSED) Graduate Award in Polymer Chemistry for 2025.
Huang completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in September 2025, co-supervised by Prof. Eugenia Kumacheva of the Department of Chemistry and Prof. Hani Naguib in Engineering. His research is in polymer science and soft matter, with a focus on hydrogels, water-rich polymer networks. He enjoys projects where he can explain why a hydrogel behaves a certain way and how to move it in a new direction by changing the polymer chemistry or the network architecture.
He is currently a postdoctoral fellow developing hydrogel-based biomaterials for tissue engineering applications.
Chemistry Stories asked Huang about his work with hydrogels, the research recognized by the CIC and how the Kumacheva Group turned out to be the perfect research environment as he moved from working on polymer nanoparticles for drug delivery into chemistry with an engineering mindset.
Could you say a little about the research this MSED award recognizes?
This award recognizes a body of work that is “complete” in the way polymer scientists often aim for: it starts from fundamental questions, builds the tools to answer them, and then turns the answers into design principles that can be used in applications.
My PhD work aimed to understand transport properties of hydrogels, that is, how ions, molecules, and nanoparticles move through polymer networks, and how that movement changes when the chemistry or the internal structure of the gel is changed. This matters because many hydrogel applications depend on transport, even when we don’t talk about it explicitly, for example, controlled release, selective separation, and creating gradient chemical environments for biomimetic systems.
Instead of treating a hydrogel as a black box that either releases quickly or slowly, I studied how specific changes in polymer chemistry and network structure translate into measurable changes in transport behavior, so people can build the network accordingly rather than relying only on trial-and-error.
A part of my PhD that I enjoyed most was putting the experimental chemistry and the theory together into one consistent picture. For example, in our Biomacromolecules paper on stimulus-responsive transport in hydrogels, we combined experiments with scaling and phenomenological models to show that transport can be controlled by designing networks that reorganize under a trigger.
What led you into this area of chemistry?
Before starting my PhD, I worked on polymer nanoparticles for drug delivery. I was interested in controlling drug release rates. That experience pulled me deeper into polymer chemistry because it made me want explanations that generalize, not just one formulation that happens to work. Being co-supervised by Eugenia Kumacheva and Hani Naguib gave me a Chemistry-and-Engineering way of thinking at the same time: design the polymer network with chemical precision, and evaluate it with an engineer’s mindset.
That combination shaped my approach. I learned to ask both, “what did we synthesize?” and “what does it do, and why?” The Kumacheva Group was also an ideal environment for my interests because it supports deep work in polymer science and soft matter while staying connected to broader directions through strong ties with engineering, biomedical research, and industry-facing problems. I started my PhD by designing hydrogels as wound dressings, but I became increasingly focused on the underlying question: what controls transport and release in hydrogels, and how can we tune it deliberately? Over time, I shifted from optimizing one application toward building a more general understanding that could apply across many systems.
How does this recognition from the CIC feel?
I feel grateful and encouraged. This award feels like it recognizes the larger arc of my PhD, how the work fits together across multiple projects and iterations. In that sense, it celebrates persistence in building a coherent picture, which is an essential skill as I work toward building my own research program (hopefully) in the future.
This achievement also reflects the mentorship and support I received during my PhD. I benefited from guidance from Prof. Kumacheva and Prof. Naguib, and from the research culture around them, where careful thinking, strong evidence, and clear explanations are valued. I also learned a lot from lab members and collaborators who challenged assumptions, suggested better controls, and helped sharpen how the results were framed. In many cases, the best improvements came from simple but honest questions from other people, such as “What else could explain this?” or “What measurement would convince you if you were skeptical?”
Looking forward, the award gives me confidence to keep building in polymer science and soft materials, and it motivates me to push the work into more applied directions where hydrogels become real engineered materials for biomedical problems. For example, I’m interested in translating what I learned about hydrogel structure into tissue-engineering contexts such as vascular repair and ocular drug delivery.
I learned to ask both, “what did we synthesize?” and “what does it do, and why?” -Dr. Yuhang Huang