Elizabeth Elacqua named Weinreb Early Career Professor
Elizabeth Elacqua, associate professor of chemistry, has been appointed the Weinreb Early Career Professor. The professorship provides support to an outstanding faculty member studying organic chemistry during the critical first years of their Penn State career.
“I am delighted that Beth is being recognized with the Weinreb Early Career Professorship,” said Kenneth Knappenberger, head of the Penn State Department of Chemistry. “Beth is an outstanding colleague and valued departmental citizen who leads a world-class research program, is an innovate classroom teacher, and gives tirelessly to our service needs. Her research is groundbreaking in that it leverages advances in organic synthesis to push polymer and materials chemistry forward. This is a very fitting and well-deserved honor for Beth.”
Elacqua’s research focuses on tackling problems that could enable researchers to design and/or access more optimal polymers and molecules. Her group takes an interdisciplinary approach, using both polymer chemistry — which focuses on large molecules with repeating subunits — and organic chemistry — which focuses on a compound’s structure, properties, and reactions — to design new materials that could have implications in catalysis, energy, and electronics. Her group has developed innovative strategies to control the sequence of chemical units that compose certain polymers and to improve the efficiency of catalysts that work together in order to significantly speed up chemical reactions, especially those mediated by light. Her group has also investigated how abundant planar compounds might inspire new materials, aiming to develop carbon-based polymers from simple petroleum-based or biomass-derived sources, a program that has been recognized through the past award of a Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Elacqua was previously honored with the Rustum and Della Roy Innovation in Materials Research Award from the Penn State Materials Research Institute in 2023, a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2021, a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in 2021, a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award in 2020, and an American Chemical Society (ACS) Doctoral New Investigator Award in 2019. She was named an ACS Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering Early Career Investigator in 2023, a Polymer Chemistry Emerging Investigator in 2023, an ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Young Academic Investigator in 2021, and a Journal of Polymer Science Young Investigator in 2021, all of which involved presenting research talks and/or publishing research papers in special symposia or journal collections.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 2017, Elacqua was a postdoctoral research associate at the Molecular Design Institute and the Department of Chemistry at New York University. She earned a doctoral degree at the University of Iowa in 2012 and a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology at Le Moyne College in 2006.
The Weinreb Family Early Career Professorships were established in 2014 by Steven and Nancy Weinreb to support young faculty in the Department of Chemistry. Steven Weinreb, the Russell and Mildred Marker Professor Emeritus of Natural Products Chemistry, joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry in 1978 and served as department head and interim dean of the Eberly College of Science, while his wife Nancy served for many years as a library assistant within the Penn State Libraries.