Reid Van Lehn is the Conway Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Prior to joining UW–Madison in 2016, Van Lehn was a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Van Lehn group develops and applies molecular simulation techniques to characterize, predict, and engineer the properties of soft materials and complex fluid mixtures. They employ a combination of simulation and data-driven techniques across multiple time and length scales to uncover relationships between nanoscale properties and macroscopic behavior. In particular, the group focuses on multicomponent systems with spatially varying properties, studying the behavior of both synthetic (e.g., nanoparticles, surfactants, and peptides) and biological (e.g., proteins, lipid bilayers, and biopolymers) soft materials and multicomponent solvent mixtures. The insight acquired from these simulations can be used to inform the design of new systems for a range of applications, including drug delivery, biosensing, molecular recognition, liquid-phase catalysis, separations, and self-assembly.