Christine Luscombe is currently a Professor and Chair of the Faculty at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Okinawa, Japan. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2000, she worked with Profs. Andrew Holmes and Wilhelm Huck in the Melville Laboratory of Polymer Synthesis at the University of Cambridge where her research focused on surface modifications using supercritical carbon dioxide for her PhD. She received the Syngenta Award for best organic chemistry project for her PhD. In January 2004, she joined the group of Prof. Jean Fréchet at UC Berkeley for her post-doctoral studies where she began her research on semiconducting polymers for organic photovoltaics. She was the recipient of the Lindemann Fellowship and the Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship (University of Cambridge) for her post-doctoral studies.
In September 2006, she joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received a number of young faculty awards including the NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, as well as the Sloan Research Fellowship. More recent awards include Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry of Japan Lecture Award (2017), Elected member of Washington State Academy of Sciences (2020), and Society of Polymer Science Japan Science Award (2022). Her current research focuses on the synthesis of semiconducting polymers for organic electronic, and more recently on investigating microplastics in marine organisms. She has published over 140 papers in these areas of research.
She is currently serving on the Editorial Advisory Boards for a number of journals including Chemical Reviews, Polymer International, Advanced Electronic Materials, ACS Applied Polymer Materials, Journal of Applied Physics, and Advanced Functional Materials. She is an Associate Editor for Macromolecules. Her involvement in other societies include being members of Materials Research Society (MRS), American Chemical Society (ACS) and The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) (former Associate Editor for Journal of Materials Chemistry A). She is currently serving on the Executive Board of International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), Board of Directors for Materials Research Society (MRS), and on the Board for The Society of Polymer Science, Japan (SPSJ).