Asbury Receives a Department of Energy Early Career Award

John Asbury, an assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State University, has been honored with a Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Research award. The award is designed "to bolster the nation's scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work." The award also aims to provide scientists with incentives to focus on fields of research that are a high priority to the Department of Energy and to the United States.

In his research, Asbury focuses on fundamental challenges in understanding and developing quantum-dot materials and organic photovoltaic materials, which are being developed as replacements for silicon and which will enable electrical power generation from solar radiation at low cost. Making progress in this area has required development of new ultrafast vibrational-spectroscopy techniques, which enable researchers to study the chemical processes that occur in these emerging electronic materials and solar cells. Asbury's research has applications in lighting and display technologies, as well as in the field of photovoltaics.

Asbury's other awards and honors include a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2009, an Eli Lilly Analytical Chemistry New Faculty Award in 2007, and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award in 2005. He has published numerous scientific papers in journals such as Nature Materials, the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, and Chemical Physics Letters. He has given invited presentations about his research at symposia in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Italy, China, and Taiwan, and he is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Vacuum Society, and the Materials Research Society.

Before joining the Penn State faculty in 2005, Asbury was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. He earned a doctoral degree at Emory University in 2001 and a bachelor's degree at the University of Tennessee in 1996.