Nicholas Abbott received a Bachelor of Engineering (Chemical Engineering) from University of Adelaide, Australia in 1985, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University from 1991-1993. His initial academic appointment was at University of California-Davis. He moved to the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998 and served as Chairman of the department (2009 to 2012) and Director of the Wisconsin Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (2012 to 2018). In 2018, he joined Cornell University as the Tisch University Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. His research accomplishments related to colloids, interfaces and soft materials have been published in over 500 peer reviewed papers and led to more than 78 issued US patents. They have been acknowledged by the ACS Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry and the Alpha Chi Sigma Award of AIChE. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, an elected fellow of the AAAS and APS, and served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science from 2011 to 2021. He has co-founded two companies, Platypus Technologies LLC and Imbed Biosciences Corp.