35 Years and 35 Voices from Chemistry of Materials

Mar 28, 2023
6 min read

As Chemistry of Materials celebrates its 35^th year in 2023, this seems like an excellent opportunity to hear more from our community and gain inspiration from researchers all over the world, collecting narratives that arise from different backgrounds and different experiences – throughout 2023 these narratives will all be published in Chemistry of Materials as a series of Editorials we will call 35 Voices.

Read on to explore the first batch of interviews which showcase a diversity of research areas and intersect with broad social issues.

If you are interested in participating in this series or in hearing from a specific person in 2023, please contact Editor-in-Chief Sara Skrabalak for more information. We are especially interested in adding early career and student voices to the collection.

Professor Bettina Lotsch

Photograph of Bettina Lotsch, used with permission.

Bettina Lotsch is the Director of the Nanochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. Prior, she completed her diploma and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Munich, where she also started as an assistant professor after postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto with Geoffrey Ozin. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Chemistry of Materials publishing regularly in the journal on a diversity of topics, with her group’s most recent contribution a Methods manuscript with Sebastian Bette on monitoring intercalation in 2D materials.

Professor David Harding

Photograph of David Harding, used with permission.

David Harding is currently an associate professor at Suranaree University of Technology (SUT), in northeastern Thailand. He first moved to Thailand in 2002, after completing his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Bristol, working initially in Bangkok. After a few years, he moved to Walailak University in southern Thailand where he was a professor for 18 years. He moved to SUT in 2022, noting that in Thailand it is rare to recruited but his new university – one of Thailand’s strongest technology focused universities – is not afraid to do things differently.

In preparing this interview, he noted that the question he is most often asked is “What is it like to work in Thailand”?

In one word: challenging. Thailand is a developing country and as such the facilities here are not as comprehensive as in more developed research nations. But it’s best to think of this as a test of your ingenuity rather than as an inherent limitation. The one frustration is that our materials and chemistry community is often ignored internationally, despite the increasingly high-quality research that we do.

Dr. Prashant Kumar

Photograph of Prashant Kumar using a transmission electron microscope at the University of Minnesota and of a sunrise near his hometown of Dehradun, India.

Prashant Kumar is currently at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biointerfaces Institute working in the laboratory led by Professor Kotov. He completed his doctoral research at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.

Professor Vida Jamali

Photograph of Vida Jamali, used with permission.

Vida Jamali completed her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, followed by her Ph.D. studies in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University. She conducted postdoctoral research with Paul Alvisatos at the University of California – Berkeley and Kavli Energy Nanoscience Institute before starting as an assistant professor this academic year (August 2022) in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Professor Angshuman Nag

Photograph of Angshuman Nag, used with permission.

Angshuman Nag is a member of the journal’s Editorial Advisory Board. He completed an MS from IIT Guwahati and PhD from IISc Bangalore, both in Chemistry. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago, he started his own research group in the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) – Pune, where he is an associate professor. His research has appeared in the journal throughout his career, with studies of doped nanocrystals and, more recently, 2D materials.

Professor Galen Stucky

Galen Stucky is a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Materials (Engineering) and Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prof. Stucky has been at the University of California, Santa Barbara for 38 years, and prior to this he received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University and completed a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He held positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sandia National Laboratory, and DuPont Central Research before moving to Santa Barbara. He is a two-time member of the journal’s 1k Club which celebrates articles published in Chemistry of Materials that have been cited more than 1,000 times.

Professor Valentyn Chebanov

Valentyn Chebanov is the First Deputy General Director of the State Scientific Institution “Institute for Single Crystals” for the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine as well as the Director of the Division of Chemistry of Functional Materials in this Institution. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz (Austria) in the group of Prof. Gert Kollenz. He defended a Doctor of Sciences thesis (habilitation) in organic chemistry in 2010 and became a full Professor in 2012.

Professor Xiao-Xia Xia

Photograph of Xiao-Xia Xia, used with permission.

Xiao-Xia Xia is currently a professor at the Department of Bioengineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Before joining SJTU, she earned her PhD degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) in 2009 and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Tufts University. In 2020, she co-authored a manuscript in Chemistry of Materials on dynamic functional hydrogels,4 which was recently highlighted in our Virtual Issue on The Future of Healthcare Materials.

Professor Joya Cooley

Photograph of Joya Cooley courtesy of Matthew Gush and California State University, Fullerton.

Joya Cooley is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at California State University, FullertonShe completed a B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in Music at Furman University, then a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Davis before postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published research in Chemistry of Materials as both a graduate student and postdoctoral scholar.

Professor Mercouri Kanatzidis

Photograph of Mercouri Kanatzidis, used with permission.

Mercouri Kanatzidis is the most published author in Chemistry of Materials.

He earned his B.S. from Aristotle University in Greece before going on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He began his academic career at Michigan State University, being a Distinguished Professor there. In 2006, he moved to Northwestern University, where he holds a Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Chair Professor of Chemistry and is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. In addition to his academic responsibilities, he is also a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

Professor Yi-Chun Lu

Photograph of Yi-Chun Lu, used with permission.

Yi-Chun Lu is a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering from National Tsing Hua University and a Ph.D. also in Materials Science & Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of Chemistry of Materials’ Editorial Advisory Board, and her work appears regularly in the journal.

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