Dr. Barnes 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 a biotech start-up company in Los Angeles, CA, Dr. Barnes started his graduate studies at Northwestern University (NU) in 2010 as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow working under the tutelage of Professor Fraser Stoddart (2016 Chemistry Nobel Laureate). While at NU, Dr. Barnes developed a new class of stable organic radicals, as well as new macrocycles for binding polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in water. In 2014, Dr. Barnes 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 in St. Louis where his group is focused on synthesizing new functional polymers to make redox-responsive and photodynamic soft materials, targeted polymeric nanomaterials for drug combination therapies, and developing novel topologically complex polymers and materials influenced by the mechanical bond. Dr. Barnes 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. He is excited to join the advisor board at Immunophotonics, Inc., lending his expertise in biopolymers and polymer-based cancer therapies and, more broadly, polymer synthesis and characterization.