Materials Science and Engineering Research Professor Daniel Krogstad has joined the Beckman Institute.

 “I am excited to be officially joining the Autonomous Materials Group and the larger Beckman community,” Krogstad said. “I am looking forward to growing collaborations with Beckman researchers and helping to bring the Illinois Polymer Maker Laboratory to life as an important national user facility for polymers research at Beckman.” The laboratory is currently being constructed.

Krogstad works on polymers and soft materials. His research focuses on using inspiration from biological systems to create materials with improved properties for use as coatings, adhesives, 3D printable materials and biomaterials. A key aspect of the work is to control the multi-scale structure through the co-design of both the materials and the processing methods.  

 His research uses high throughput experimentation, which means using automated robotics to make and test the materials to generate datasets faster than manual methods. His experiments consider the many combinations possible when designing materials and the processing methods used to create them

 Krogstad earned a B.S. in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2006, and a Ph.D. in materials at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2012. In 2013, he received a National Research Council Research Associateship to do his postdoctoral research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the Biomaterials group. He joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2014, first at the Illinois Applied Research Institute, and then the Department of Material Science and Engineering as an associate research professor in 2025.