Sip & Play @ the ACS Fall Meeting

Sara E. Skrabalak is a Provost-appointed James H. Rudy Professor at Indiana University – Bloomington. She has appointments in the Departments of Chemistry and Intelligent Systems Engineering. She received her B.A. degree in Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington in Seattle from 2007-2008 and began on the faculty at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2008. Prior to assuming the role of Editor-in-Chief for Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Letters, she served as an Associate Editor for Nanoscale and Nanoscale Advances, both from the Royal Society of Chemistry. She, with her students, has published over a hundred papers in peer reviewed journals and one book. Her research interests span a broad number of topics, with a focus on solid-state chemistry and nanomaterials, with strong influences from chemical engineering. Her group is largely known for providing hypothesis-driven approaches for the synthesis of new materials with defined crystal shape and architecture for applications in energy science, catalysis, separations, plasmonics, chemical sensing, and secured electronics.

Gilbert Walker is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry of the University of Toronto. He is the Associate Scientific Director, Nanomedicine Innovation Network and the Chief Technical Officer of Sylleta Inc., which is developing technologies for aquaculture. Walker earned an AB in Chemistry and Mathematics from Bowdoin College in 1985 and did undergraduate research with Ronald Christensen. Walker’s PhD in Chemistry in ultrafast chemical dynamics was earned in 1991 from University of Minnesota, working with Paul Barbara. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Robin Hochstrasser at University of Pennsylvania where he studied early events in bacterial photosynthesis. He was a tenured professor at University of Pittsburgh from 1993-2004 before moving to Toronto as a Canada Research Chair Professor in 2005.

Cathleen Crudden was born in Belfast, N. Ireland, and raised in Toronto, Canada. She obtained B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Toronto, a Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa and carried out an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. She is currently A.V. Douglas Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 2022 she started as Scientific Director of the Carbon to Metal Coating Institute. She also holds a Research Professorship and runs a satellite lab at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (ITbM) in Nagoya, Japan. Dr. Crudden held a visiting professorship in the labs of Professor Noyori (Nobel Prize 2001) and a Global Center of Excellence Professor at Kyoto University. She served as President of the Canadian Society for Chemistry in 2012/2013 and on the Board of Directors. She was Chair of the Chemical Institute of Canada in 2021-2022.

Professor Kamat earned his doctoral degree in Physical Chemistry from the Bombay University (1979), and carried out postdoctoral research at Boston University (1979-1981) and the University of Texas at Austin (1981-1983). He joined the Radiation Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame in 1983 and initiated a project on utilizing semiconductor nanostructures for light energy conversion. He is currently a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Notre Dame. He has published more than 350 papers in peer reviewed journals. He has edited two books on nanostructured materials. He served as the Deputy Editor of The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters from 2010 to 2016. For the past 25 years Prof. Kamat has been conducting DOE-BES supported research in the areas of photochemistry and photoelectrochemistry of semiconductor nanostructures and sensitizing dyes at Notre Dame. During the early years, his research was focused on understanding interfacial charge transfer processes in semiconductor and metal colloids and nanostructures.

Stefanie Dehnen (born in 1969) is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Director of the Scientific Center of Materials Science at Philipps University Marburg. Her current research interests are synthesis, formation mechanisms, and physical properties of compounds and materials with binary and ternary chalcogenidometalate anions, organotetrel chalcogenide compounds, binary Zintl anions, and ternary intermetalloid clusters. Professor Dehnen obtained her diploma in 1993 and her doctoral degree in 1996 from the University of Karlsruhe under the supervision of Dieter Fenske on experimental and theoretical investigations of copper sulfide and selenide clusters. After a postdoctoral stay with Reinhart Ahlrichs in the Theoretical Chemistry Department at Karlsruhe, she completed her Habilitation at Karlsruhe in 2004, investigating the chemistry of chalcogenostannate salts.

Sébastien Lecommandoux received his Ph.D. (1996) in Physical Chemistry from the University of Bordeaux. After a postdoctoral experience at the University of Illinois (UIUC, USA) in the group of Prof. Samuel I. Stupp, he started his academic career at the Laboratoire de Chimie des Polymères Organiques as Associate Professor in 1998 and was promoted to Full Professor at Bordeaux INP in 2005. He is currently Director of the Laboratoire de Chimie des Polymères Organiques (LCPO-CNRS) and is leading the group “Polymers Self-Assembly and Life Sciences”. His research interests include the design of bio-inspired polymers for biomaterials and pharmaceutical develoment, especially based on polypeptide, proteins and polysaccharide-based block copolymers self-assembly, the design of polymersomes for drug-delivery and theranostic, as well as biomimetic approaches toward design of synthetic viruses and artificial cells. He published over 230 publications in international journal, 6 book chapters and 12 patents (3 being licenced, 1 start-up created Doxanano). He is also co-director of the joint laboratory LCPO-L’OREAL. Sébastien Lecommandoux is recipient of the CNRS bronze medal (2004), Institut Universitaire de France Junior Chair (IUF 2007), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry RSC (2017), French Academy of Science Chemistry Seqens Award (2019), Member of the Academia Europaea (2020), XingDa Lectureship Award from Peking University (2021). He currently holds the Chaire annuelle Innovation technologique Liliane Bettencourt, Collège de France (2024-2025). He is Editor-in-Chief of Biomacromolecules (ACS) since 2020 after serving as Associate Editor since 2013. He is also in the Editorial Advisory Board of several international journals, including Bioconjugate Chemistry (ACS), Polymer Chemistry (RSC) and Biomaterials Science (RSC).  

Born in Cuba in 1963 and based in Switzerland, Professor Carreira is both the first JACS editor-in-chief to live outside of the U.S. and the first Latin American to lead the journal. Carreira obtained his Bachelor of Science in 1984 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Scott E. Denmark and a Ph.D. degree in 1990 from Harvard University under the supervision of David A. Evans. He has been a full professor at the Organic Chemistry Laboratory of the ETH Zürich since 1998. A self-described “generalist,” Professor Carreira’s current research focuses on a variety of multidisciplinary fields, including natural products total synthesis, synthetic methods, and catalysis to prepare molecules with asymmetric bond construction. He is co-founder of three start-up companies and has been involved in the development of several chemistry education software tools. Professor Carreira is a member of both the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He’s been a member of the American Chemical Society for 37 years and has received numerous awards from the society, including the 2013 ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry.

Dr. Osorio is Chemist of Universidad Nacional de Colombia (1993), and obtained her M. Sc and Dr. Sc. in Chemistry at the same University in 1995 and 2001, respectively. She was research fellow in natural product chemistry at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan (1998) and visiting scientist in biochemistry lab at Universidad de La República, Montevideo, Uruguay (2000), during her doctorate. After her doctorate, she did a stay at Technical University of Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (2002), and has been visiting researcher at Department of Food Science & Technology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA (2005) and Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany (2018). Dr. Osorio started her academic career at Department of Chemistry of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia as Associated Instructor (1997); continued as Assistant Professor (1998), Associated Professor (2006), and currently serves as Professor since 2014. She is Deputy Editor of ACS Food Science & Technology, and has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry since 2016.