Karen I. Winey

Karen Irene Winey is an American polymer scientist with a 50:50 appointment in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Materials Science Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Education Winey majored in materials science and engineering for her undergraduate degree (1985) at Cornell University. Winey earned her masters (1989) and PhD (1991) in polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the latter in the laboratory of Edwin L. Thomas. She completed a postdoc under Ronald G. Larson at Bell Labs. In 2020, Winey won the Braskem Award for Excellence in Materials Engineering and Science for her work in nanocomposites and ion-containing polymers. She has been a Penn Engineering Wellness Ambassador.

Winey is known internationally for her work using X-ray scattering to characterize polymers, including a recent collaboration with the University of Konstanz. Her lab also focuses on solid polymer electrolyte materials (with such applications as batteries) to replace materials like Nafion. Winey has described Nafion as "something of a fluke. Its structure has been the subject of debate for decades, and will likely never be fully understood or controlled." Winey's group uses scattering and imaging techniques to characterize nanoscale morphologies of polymers and relate them to their ion transport properties. In 2012 she received the National Science Foundation George H. Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research.

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