IU Bloomington chemist named Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Sara E. Skrabalak, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, is one of 15 U.S. scientists named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar for 2014.
This selection, announced by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, recognizes young faculty in the chemical sciences. Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars are in the first years of their careers, have created an independent body of outstanding scholarship and demonstrated a commitment to education.
The award includes an unrestricted grant of $75,000. Skrabalak will use the funding to support her research program, with some of it serving as seed money for a new direction in which her research group will study how nanostructures form in real-time, in solution via transmission electron microscopy. The work is in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
“The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award is the Dreyfus Foundation’s flagship program,” said Mark Cardillo, executive director of foundation. “The intent is to support exceptional young academic researchers at an early and crucial stage of their careers. They have been selected based on their independent contributions to both research in the chemical sciences and education.”
Skrabalak and her associates conduct research in materials chemistry and nanoscience. Her work emphasizes the development of strategies to control the shape of nanomaterials for the study of how structure imparts functionality for applications in catalysis, chemical sensing and separations.
Along with Erin E. Carlson, also an IU Bloomington assistant professor of chemistry, Skrabalak was named a Cottrell Scholar in 2012 and a Sloan Research Fellow in 2013. She received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2010, a Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2013, and the Pure Chemistry Award in 2014 from the American Chemical Society.
She earned a B.A. in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington and has been on the faculty at IU Bloomington since 2008.
Since its inception in 1970, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar program has awarded over $40 million. The Dreyfus Foundation was established in 1946 by chemist, inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus in honor of his brother Henry, with its purpose “to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances around the world.”
Previous Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars on the IU Bloomington Department of Chemistry faculty include Amar Flood, David Clemmer, Jeremy Smith, Ted Widlanski and James Reilly.
