Todd Hoare

Associate Professor

Todd Hoare is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University, joining McMaster in 2008 after a post-doctoral fellowship with Robert Langer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hoare specializes in engineering hydrogels and microgels with targeted 'smart' properties, with a focus on correlating material properties with biological responses to develop new drug delivery vehicles with 'on demand' or environment-specific activity, cell scaffolds with tunable cell adhesion and spreading properties, or material interfaces with controllable cell or protein interactions. Example projects of ongoing work at the Biointerfaces Institute include developing low-fouling printable paper test strips and thermoresponsive hydrogel supports for stem cell expansion and recovery, the latter applying high throughput techniques. Hoare's work has been profiled by Popular Science, Wired, and BBC for its potential in solving clinical challenges through innovative biomaterials design. He has published over 50 papers, has one granted patent and nine pending patent applications, and won an NSERC Innovation Challenge award recognizing the novelty and commercializability of his research. Hoare has received an Early Researcher Award and the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Chemistry in recognition of his accomplishments in his early career as a faculty member, and was recently appointed one of three Distinguished Engineering Fellows in the Faculty of Engineering at McMaster. He is also an Associate Editor of Chemical Engineering Journal for materials engineering, a member of the editorial advisory board for Colloid and Polymer Science, and national president of the Canadian Chapter of the Controlled Release Society.