Schaak Receives Inaugural Scialog Award

Raymond Schaak, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State, has received one of the eleven inaugural Scialog Awards sponsored by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The multi-year program is designed to accelerate the work of 21st-century science by funding scientists to pursue transformative research early during their careers, in dialog with their fellow grantees, and on crucial issues of scientific inquiry. Schaak's project, "New Chemical Routes for Discovering and Improving Visible-Light Photocatalysts," is part of Scialog's initiative that encourages research on solar energy. This initiative is driven by the economic and national-security implications associated with a reliable, domestic, and renewable energy supply.

Throughout his career, Schaak's research has combined ideas from solid-state chemistry, molecular chemistry, and nanoscience. He studies synthesis; in particular, the development of straightforward chemical methods for making complex nanoscale solids that could impact such areas as energy, catalysis, optics, medicine, information processing, and information storage. A key focus of Schaak's research program is forming solids at temperatures much lower than typically required. For example, many alloys that typically require temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit can be made at temperatures below 650 degrees — and in some cases, even at room temperature — using techniques developed in Schaak's laboratory.

In 2007, Schaak was honored with a five-year Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award and a three-year Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2006, he received a three-year DuPont Young Professor Grant, a three-year Beckman Young Investigator Award, and a five-year National Science Foundation Career Award. Schaak has authored many scientific papers in international, peer-reviewed journals and serves as an associate editor for ACS Nano and as an Editorial Advisory Board member for the Journal of Solid State Chemistry. He has presented dozens of invited talks, has served on several National Science Foundation workshop panels, and has organized symposia at regional and national scientific meetings. He currently serves as a co-chair of the Awards Committee for the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry.

Before joining Penn State as a faculty member in August 2007, Schaak was an assistant professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University from 2003 to 2007. He was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University from 2001 to 2003. Schaak earned his doctoral degree in chemistry in 2001 at Penn State and his bachelor's degree in chemistry at Lebanon Valley College in 1998.