| Citation | Distinguished for innovative polymer synthesis, Feast has devised elegant routes to key materials. His ingenious route to polyacetylene via processable precursors which undergo thermal symmetry-allowed eliminations of arenes made the insoluble, infusible target, which is of pivotal interest to experimentalists and theoreticians, available in morphologically controlled form for the first time. He established other routes to conjugated polymers including those based on enol chemistry and McMurray coupling. He has shown that ring opening metathesis polymerization can be successfully applied to functionalized monomers, including the living and stereoregular polymerization of fluorinated monomers and that of carboxylate functionalized monomers in water. He established many syntheses of functionalized amphiphilic molecules which are active NLO(X2) and pyroelectrics when organized in L-B superlattices. He has contributed to the cycloaddition and electocyclic chemistry of fluorinated polyenes, isolating the first primary Diels-Alder adduct of a nitrile and demonstrating sigmatropic migrations of fluorine atoms in both ground and excited states. |