The development of new optical polymeric materials possessing controllable refractive index, high transparency and low chromatic dispersion while retaining excellent thermomechanical properties is an essential area of science & engineering. Plastic optics have been widely deployed for commercial applications that require large volume and low-cost lenses, such as consumer eyewear and smartphones. Plastic optics have numerous advantages in comparison to inorganic optical materials, which include low cost, light weight, and improved processability into optical elements. However, the poor transparency and low RI values of plastic optics (n ~ 1.35 to 1.75) in the 2-14 m SWIR-MWIR-LWIR region has prevented deployment of these materials for IR optics. The poor IR transparency of plastic optics arises from bond vibrations of C-H, CC and C-X atoms present in the structural framework of organic polymers. Hence, there remains a tremendous technological opportunity to both increase the RI of polymers (n >2.0) and enhance optical transmittance in the IR spectrum from 2-14 μm by designing and synthesizing advanced polymeric materials. In this talk, Prof. Jeffrey Pyun will discuss his recent progress with several new classes of optical polymers for potential use in consumer plastics optics, IR optics and polymer waveguide photonics. These include his work with optical materials based on, chalcogenide hybrid inorganic/organic polymers (CHIPs) for IR optics (Pyun et al. Adv. Mater. 2014, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019), refractive index contrast (RIC) polymers for photonic devices (ACS Macro Lett. 2020, J. Light. Tech.2022, OMEx 2022) and new unpublished work on low cost, thiol-free optical polymers for high RI, high Abbe number optical products.