Polymers containing electrophilic moieties, such as activated esters, epoxides, and alkyl halides, can be readily modified with a variety of nucleophiles to produce useful functional materials. The modification of epoxide-containing polymers with amines and other strong nucleophiles is welldocumented, but there are no reports on the modification of such polymers with alcohols. Using phenyloxirane and glycidyl butyrate as low molecular weight model compounds, it was determined that the acid-catalyzed ring-opening of arylsubstituted epoxides by alcohols to form b-hydroxy ether products was significantly more efficient than that of alkylsubstituted epoxides. An aryl epoxide-type styrenic monomer, 4-vinylphenyloxirane (4VPO), was synthesized in high yield using an improved procedure and then polymerized in a controlled manner under reversible addition-fragmentation chaintransfer (RAFT) polymerization conditions. A successful chain extension with styrene proved the high degree of chain-end functionalization of the poly4VPO-based macro chain transfer agent. Poly4VPO was modified with a library of alcohols and phenols, some of which contained reactive functionalities, e.g., azide, alkyne, allyl, etc., using either CBr 4 (in PhCN at 90 8C for 2-3 days) or BF 3 (in CH 2 Cl 2 at ambient temperature over 30 min) as the catalyst. The resulting b-hydroxy ether-functionalized homopolymers were characterized using size exclusion chromatography, 1 H NMR and IR spectroscopy, and thermal gravimetric analysis.