
Christopher Ober received his B.Sc. (Honours Chemistry) from the University of Waterloo, Canada and his PhD in Polymer Science & Engineering at UMass Amherst. After several years at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada working in marking technology, Ober joined Cornell University in 1986. His research is focused on lithography, patterning, the biology materials interface, and control of surface structure in thin films. From 2009 to 2010 he was interim Dean of Engineering at Cornell and he is currently the Director of the Cornell Nanoscale Facility.
He is the 2006 winner of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Applied Polymer Science and received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2007. In 2009, Ober was named a Fellow of the ACS (inaugural class) and was awarded the Gutenberg Research Prize by the University of Mainz. In 2013 he received the Society of Polymer Science Japan (SPSJ) International Prize. In 2014 he was a JSPS Fellow in Japan. More recently he was named a fellow of the APS (2014) and the AAAS (2015). Ober was honored in 2015 with the Photopolymer Science & Technology Outstanding Contribution Award and made a SPIE Senior Member (2018). He has over 700 publications and over 40 patents and patent applications.