Karen I. Winey earned a B.S. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After a postdoctoral position at AT&T Bell Laboratories, she joined the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and earned the position of Full Professor in 2005. The Winey Group designs and fabricates new polymer nanocomposites containing carbon nanotubes and now metal nanowires with the aim of understanding how to improve their mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. With ion-containing polymers, including block copolymers, their focus is uncovering the nanoscale structure using a variety of state-of-the-art instruments for both static and dynamic experiments and then correlating the structure with the ion conduction. Winey is a fellow of the American Physical Society, received an NSF Special Creativity Award in 2009, chaired the 2010 Polymer Physics Gordon Research Conference, and is currently an Associate Editor for Macromolecules.