Bollinger Honored with Palmer Faculty Mentoring Award

J. Martin Bollinger Jr., a professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, has been selected by the Penn State Graduate School to receive the Howard B. Palmer Faculty Mentoring Award. The award, which includes a monetary prize and a certificate, is presented to a full-time faculty member who demonstrates "effective mentoring through guiding and nurturing the collegial and professional development of junior faculty." This award was established in 1991 in honor of Howard Palmer, who served as senior associate dean of the Graduate School from 1985 to 1991.

Bollinger is known for his revolutionary work in chemistry, particularly for his development of new and unprecedented paradigms for how nature exploits dioxygen -- the most chemically stable form of oxygen. Bollinger's current research projects focus on enzymes that use metal ions to catalyze reactions involving oxygen. The metal ions in these enzymes react with oxygen and form potent intermediates that break strong bonds between carbon and hydrogen atoms during biochemical transformations of organic compounds. Such biochemical transformations are central to the regulation of normal cellular physiology and to the development and progression of important human diseases.

In 2009, Bollinger won a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1986 at Penn State and a doctoral degree in biochemistry in 1993 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School before joining the Penn State faculty in 1995.