Raymond Schaak
Professional Appointments and Affiliations
DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry
Professor of Chemical Engineering
Office
523 Chemistry Building
University Park, PA 16802
Email: res20@psu.edu
(814) 865-8600
Education
B.S. Lebanon Valley College, 1998
Ph.D. Penn State University, 2001
Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University, 2001 - 2003
Honors and Awards
NSF CAREER Award, 2006
Beckman Young Investigator Award, 2006
DuPont Young Professor Grant, 2006
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, 2007
Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 2007
National Fresenius Award, 2011
Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences, 2012
ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award, 2016
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2017
Research
The Schaak group’s main research interests are in the general area of synthetic inorganic nanochemistry. We identify target materials systems that underpin practical, relevant, and emerging applications, but for which a fundamentally interesting synthetic bottleneck precludes their formation. We then seek to develop new synthetic tools that overcome these challenges, both to generate and study our specific target materials and also to provide conceptually new synthetic approaches that are broadly applicable. Our targets, materials systems, and applications are diverse, spanning metals, metal alloys, metal oxides, metal chalcogenides, metal phosphides, metal carbides, and metal borides for use in catalysis, photonics, magnetic separations, and energy conversion and storage. Current research projects include (a) discovering and studing new non-noble-metal catalysts, comprised of inexpensive and Earth-abundant elements, for solar energy conversion and fuel cell applications, (b) developing a “total synthesis” toolkit for the construction of multi-functional hybrid inorganic nanostructures, and (c) synthesizing and studying the formation pathways of metal chalcogenide nanostructures with useful catalytic, magnetic, and optical properties.