John Ugelstad

John Ugelstad (1921 to 1997) was a Norwegian chemical engineer and inventor, known for discovering a process to manufacture monodisperse micropellets or microbeads and Dynabeads. Born in Trondheim, the son of a factory owner, he passed the engineering exam at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1948, worked at Philips research in Eindhoven, took a doctorate at the University of Leiden in 1955 and joined the Institute of Industrial Chemistry at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1957, where he was a professor from 1966 to 1991 and a consultant to DuPont. A theory of emulsion polymerization from his 1964 to 1965 sabbatical replaced the established theories. In 1977 he devised a way to make identical polymer spheres in an ordinary laboratory and patented it, and at SINTEF he then developed magnetic versions that were used from 1983 to treat bone marrow cancer. He was a member of three Norwegian academies, and the Ugelstad Laboratory in Trondheim is named after him.