Dr. Jon Barnes

​Dr. Jon Barnes is the CTO and co-founder of Precision Carbon Technologies, LLC. He completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 2006. After working for a few years in industry for Dr. Baker's startup company, Synedgen, Inc., in Los Angeles, CA, he started his graduate studies in 2010 as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow at Northwestern University (NU) in Evanston, IL under the tutelage of Professor Fraser Stoddart (2016 Chemistry Nobel Laureate). In 2014, Jon moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an HHMI postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation in Professor Jeremiah Johnson’s group, where he investigated new sequence-defined polymer methodologies and combination drug-loaded nanoparticles for cancer treatment. 

In 2016, he began his independent career at Washington University, where his group has focused on synthesizing new functional polymers to make light-responsive hydrogels, mechanically interlocked molecules, and high-performance carbon fibers. Jon received a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and a Young Investigator Award from the Cancer Research Foundation in 2017. He was also named a 2019 Kavli Fellow by the Kavli Foundation and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, as well as a 2020 Emerging Investigator by the journal Polymer Chemistry and a 2020 Young Investigator by the American Chemical Society's Division of Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering. In 2023, he was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemistry with tenure. He has published nearly 60 papers in top scientific journals and has several patents related to his research on soft materials and carbon fibers.