Chad Mirkin joins elite echelon of chemists in receiving prestigious Harrison Howe Award
Chad A. Mirkin will receive the 2018 Harrison Howe Award from the Rochester Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Mirkin, the director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will be honored for his outstanding and broad contributions to chemistry research. The Howe Award honors Harrison Estell Howe, a leader of ACS Rochester, the founding editor of Chemical & Engineering News and a fervent champion of industrial research and development.
In receiving this award, Mirkin joins an elite echelon of chemists, as 26 recipients (39 percent) have gone on to become Nobel laureates. Linus Pauling, honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, won the first Harrison Howe Award in 1946.
The award and an honorarium will be presented at the 2018 Harrison Howe Symposium, held in Mirkin’s honor, this fall in Rochester, New York.
Astronomer named Cottrell Scholar
Claude-André Faucher-Giguère has been named a 2018 Cottrell Scholar by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The designation comes with a $100,000 award for research and teaching.
Faucher-Giguère, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, was cited for his work on “The Physics, Observational Signatures and Consequences of Galactic Winds Driven by Active Galactic Nuclei.”
The Cottrell program is designed to foster synergy among faculty at major American research universities, primarily undergraduate institutions. There were 24 Cottrell Scholars selected this year. The Cottrell Scholar Conference will be July 11-13 in Tucson, Ariz.
TREE Award in chemistry
Teri W. Odom, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry, is one of three Cottrell Scholar TREE Award recipients for 2018.
The award, presented by the Research Corporation for Science Achievement, recognizes outstanding research and educational accomplishments among Cottrell Scholars. Odom is known for her design of anisotropic and multi-scale nanomaterials as well as her invention of key nanoscale patterning methods.
The TREE Award consists of an unrestricted $20,000 award sent to Northwestern on behalf of Odom’s educational and scholarly work. Another $5,000 is provided to Odom to support lectures and travel to other institutions to help communicate innovative research and educational accomplishments.
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
Robert Porter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Economics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and co-director of the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category for founding and shaping the field of empirical industrial organization, a branch of economics that has developed fundamental techniques to measure market power (understood as the ability of a firm to control prices in a given industry). Porter will receive the award, along with Tim Bresnahan (Stanford University) and Ariel Pakes (Harvard University).
New Investigator Award in Developmental Biology
Christian Petersen
Northwestern associate professor of molecular biosciences Christian Petersen will receive the 2018 Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award from the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB). This award recognizes a new early-stage investigator performing outstanding research in developmental biology.
Petersen will be honored for his research, which uses the flatworm planarian as a research model organism to uncover the biology underlying tissue regeneration and the control of adult stem cells.
Along with receiving this award, Petersen will give a platform lecture on his work at the SDB’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon July 20-24, 2018.
Early-Career Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry
The Physical Chemistry Division Awards recognizes outstanding scientific members each year in four categories. Weiss will be honored for pioneering contributions in the study and control of interfacial processes in colloidal nanocrystals, and charge transport in low-conductivity materials by electron ratcheting. Weiss is the Dow Chemical Company Research Professor and a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (by courtesy) in thedepartment of chemistry.
Weiss will receive the award at the Fall ACS Meeting, Aug. 19-23, 2018 in Boston.
Chinese Chemical Society Honorary Fellow
George Schatz
George C. Schatz, a Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society. There are only 100 such fellows worldwide; the organization has more than 50,000 members.
Honorary Fellow is the highest honor awarded by the society and is given to “the distinguished chemists of the world who have made significant contributions to the advancement of chemistry as well as to the development of Chinese chemistry and the society,” according to a letter from the society.
Schatz’s research involves theory and computation as it applies to problems in nanotechnology, properties of materials, macromolecular structures and dynamics, molecular self-assembly, optics, materials physics and biophysics.
Other Northwestern chemists named an Honorary Fellow include Tobin Marks (2015) and Chad Mirkin (2010).
