Heather D. Maynard is the Dr Myung Ki Hong Professor in Polymer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Maynard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

She moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara for her master's studies in materials science.

After earning her master's degree in 1995, Maynard joined the California Institute of Technology, where she worked in the research group of Robert H. Grubbs.

She moved to ETH Zurich as an American Chemical Society Fellow with Jeffrey Hubbell.

[4] Her research considers polymer materials, including arrays, films for patterning, bioactive proteins and new ways to develop protein-polymer conjugates.

[5] These conjugates are used in medical therapeutics to treat a range of diseases, and are synthesised by polymerising from proteins and amino acid-reactive initiators.

[1] This includes the development of new synthetic pathways, such as controlled radical polymerization and click chemistry, to make polymers with narrow molecular weight distributions and anchoring sites for particular surfaces.

If they containpyridyl disulfide groups they can be cross-linked into nanoparticles using peptide glucagon, made bioactive in vitro, neutral to pH and protected from making aggregates.

[7] In 2016 she was selected as a Fulbright Foundation New Zealand scholar, where she worked on biohybrid polymer materials at the University of Auckland.