Christian Pester receives the NSF CAREER Award
Christian Pester, K. Hepler Early Career Professor of Chemical Engineering, has received an NSF CAREER award for “Photocatalytic Optical Fibers”. The NSF CAREER award is a Faculty Early Career Development Program across all disciplines from NSF (National Science Foundation). It is one of NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.
The Pester group’s research is at the interface between chemistry, engineering, and materials science. They are trying to engineer new ways and improve how light can be used to drive chemical reactions. Both small and large molecules (polymers) can nowadays be synthesized by using photocatalysis and visible light. For this to work effectively, the photocatalysts themselves need to absorb light efficiently. This inherently limits how far light can reach into the reaction medium and scalability can become a challenge. Furthermore, photocatalyst impurities in the final products can lead to degradation or other undesirable side reactions.
With this award, Pester says his group is “hoping to find ways to irradiate reactions more efficiently from the inside by using photocatalytic optical fibers while simultaneously providing pristine products without residual catalyst. When it comes to our outreach efforts, we intend to build bridges between academia, industry and schools. By bridging this gap, we can hopefully facilitate access to higher education for socioeconomically challenged and underrepresented groups in rural Pennsylvania.”
Pester was previously named an IUPAC Young Observer (2021) and elected as ACS PMSE member-at-large (2021). Before that, he was awarded the Thomas K. Hepler Early Career Professorship in Chemical Engineering from Penn State (2020) and an ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award (2019).
Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in 2017, Pester earned a Ph.D. in natural sciences (chemistry) from the DWI Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) in 2013. Subsequently, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Barbara.