Johanna Schwartz

Path to Livermore

Staff scientist Johanna Schwartz’s passion for material chemistry began long before she stepped foot onsite at LLNL. As a high school student, she spent her evenings and weekends synthesizing polymers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, learning the intricacies of problem solving in the laboratory setting. Eager to deepen her understanding of the complex chemistry of materials, she then earned a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and biology from Bard College at Simon’s Rock.

While her early ambition was to synthesize complex natural products, a shift later occurred in graduate school when she discovered polymer mechanochemistry. She completed her Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and at the time, the burgeoning field of 3D printing caught her attention, so she then realized her niche: chemistry-driven 3D printing. 

Livermore came into view when she met research engineer Chris Spadaccini—then Livermore’s Director for the Center for Engineered Materials and Manufacturing (CEMM)—at a conference six years ago. He introduced her to LLNL’s Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory, which at the time was still an empty building. The prospect of shaping a new space at a National Lab, something she hadn’t considered before, inspired her to join LLNL as a postdoctoral researcher, leading into her now six-year career as a staff scientist building the “lab of the future.” 

Mission-Driven Research and Collaboration 

As a leading staff scientist in Livermore’s Materials Science Division in the Physical Life Sciences Directorate, her work spans eight active projects that fall into three major areas: expanding and enabling chemistries for additive manufacturing, developing new 3D printing techniques, and using printing tools for high-throughput materials screening.

Her work with the Department of Energy’s Additive Collaboration Team (ACT) Project encompasses a collaboration among six National Labs, focused on photopolymerization of silicones for advanced 3D printing. Another thread includes volumetric additive manufacturing using microwaves to process opaque materials—extending the reach of 3D printing in materials science.

Her signature contribution, however, is the Studying-Polymers-On-a-Chip (SPOC) platform, a high-throughput screening system designed to speed up and automate materials discovery. As an experimentalist who wants to harness the power of AI, she’s building tools to generate massive datasets with millions of data points, feeding machine learning models to accelerate optimization of material properties.

“The idea is the machine can now do it all, the mixing, casting, and measurements too. So, you can come back and instead of maybe having 20 samples in a week, and you can have 500, or 5,000, exponentially increasing your productivity,” Schwartz explains. “Years of data in weeks.”

Her mission driven vision goes beyond printing optimization: SPOC is also being applied to battery electrolytes, fuel cell membranes, and even aging studies for silicone materials. Schwartz’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development projects support national security and energy resilience goals, including the development of safer, more sustainable materials to replace toxic polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)-based polymers.

Vision for the Future 

Looking ahead, she envisions a fully autonomous laboratory, including robotic arms navigating a sleek, sensor-laden workspace, generating and analyzing data in real-time, and collaborating with human researchers to optimize experimental pathways. In her words, AI should function like “another expert in the room,” helping accelerate discovery rather than replacing human intuition.

Beyond autonomy, she’s driven by impact: improving battery safety, eliminating toxic chemicals, and enabling sustainable materials. Her collaborations with industry partners like DarmokTech through the California Energy Commission’s Electric Program Investment Charge Program aim to translate lab-developed polymer electrolytes into commercial products.

“Because our society is growing, we need to diversify our energy sources and the key limit for a lot of these is scalability and cost,” says Schwartz. “And a lot of that comes back to the lifetimes and the performances of these membranes, or the interactions of the materials used in all of these different applications. And so that's where I come in.”

Ultimately, her framework is application-agnostic: better materials, smarter manufacturing, and a data-rich feedback loop to serve every mission at the Lab. “If I ever have a material I made that gets sold,” she says, “that would be awesome.” But even more rewarding is knowing that her work—puzzle-like, creative, and collaborative—is paving the way for science that benefits both people and the planet.