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May 13, 2026
Northwestern chemist Julia Kalow has received a 2026 Brown Investigator Award.
Kalow, an associate professor of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is one of eight researchers selected for the 2026 award program and the first Northwestern faculty member to receive the honor.
“Julia’s selection as the first Brown Investigator Award recipient from Northwestern is a significant milestone and a reflection of the exceptional creativity and ambition of her research,” said Omar K. Farha, chair of Northwestern’s Department of Chemistry. “Her work exemplifies the kind of bold, fundamental science that can open entirely new directions in chemistry.”
Established in 2023 by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech, the Brown Investigator Award program supports outstanding mid-career faculty pursuing research in chemistry and physics.
The program is designed to advance bold ideas that may be too early-stage for traditional funding but have the potential to reshape their fields, particularly those with long-term practical applications. Investigators receive up to $2 million over five years.
“My hope is that these awards will provide talented mid-career researchers with stable and secure funding at a moment in their careers when they are poised to make a significant impact in their fields, giving them time to focus and develop their line of thinking,” said entrepreneur and philanthropist Ross M. Brown, who established the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech, his alma mater, in 2023 through a $400 million gift.
Kalow will use the funding to investigate how hybrid light-matter states called polaritons can be used to control chemical reactions. Polaritons form when molecules interact strongly with light inside an optical cavity, creating new energetic states that could alter how reactions proceed. She proposes that these systems could enable synthetically useful reactions that do not occur under normal conditions.
To pursue this work, Kalow and her team will compare the reactivity and selectivity of model organic reactions with and without strong light-matter coupling. The project requires specialized instrumentation and expertise that would be difficult to establish without this award.
“This work is curiosity-driven basic research,” Kalow said. “We hope our findings will contribute to a growing body of work from researchers around the world that challenges existing assumptions in organic chemistry. While practical implementation may still be years away, making reactions faster or more selective, or enabling access to new products, could be broadly useful to the chemical industry.”
Kalow’s previous honors include an American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER Award and a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Kelly Levander is a marketing specialist in the Department of Chemistry.
