Chemists Receive Materials Research Society Fellowships

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University chemists Joseph T. Hupp and Teri W. Odom have been named fellows by the Materials Research Society (MRS). The highly selective MRS fellowship recognizes individuals for their significant contributions to materials research. 

Hupp, a Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, was selected for “enabling discoveries in the syntheses of functional porous materials.”

Hupp and his research group make and study molecular materials and supramolecular assemblies. Some are designed to help scientists understand fundamental aspects of molecular recognition, directed assembly, light harvesting and directional energy transport, and electron transfer reactivity. Others are designed to exploit these phenomena to solve problems involving solar energy conversion, chemical fuel storage and release, chemical sensing, molecular transport and chemical separations or selective catalysis.

Odom, a Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in Weinberg, a professor of materials science and engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and associate director of Northwestern’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, was honored for “pioneering contributions to scalable nanofabrication tools and the plasmonic meta-materials with extraordinary optical properties that have resulted from them.” 

Odom is an expert in designing structured nanoscale materials that exhibit extraordinary size and shape-dependent optical properties. She has pioneered a suite of multi-scale nanofabrication tools that has resulted in plasmon-based nanoscale lasers that exhibit tunable color and flat optics that can manipulate light at the nanoscale and beat the diffraction limit. Odom also has invented a class of biological nanoconstructs, called gold nanostars, which provide unique insight into nanoparticle-cell interactions and show superior imaging and therapeutic properties due to their shape. The nanostars can target and deliver drugs to specific components of cells, promising precision targeting for cancer therapeutics.

MRS Fellows will be honored at the MRS 2016 spring meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.