Scott Phillips Wins Dreyfus Foundation's New-Faculty Award

Scott Phillips, an assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State, has won a New Faculty Award from The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. The award provides unrestricted grants to incoming faculty members in the chemical sciences to help initiate their independent research programs. The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation is a nonprofit organization devoted to the advancement of the chemical sciences.

Phillips does research in the areas of organic and environmental chemistry, the design and synthesis of molecules with unique functions, analytical and bioanalytical chemistry, and materials chemistry. In one project, he uses organic chemistry to create diagnostic devices that provide all the functions typically obtained with laboratory instruments, but that use only organic reactions. These systems may be useful in applications that require portable and inexpensive devices for detecting disease or pollution; for example, in the developing world and in hospital emergency rooms.

In another project, Phillips is developing reactions that use carbon dioxide as an inexpensive carbon source for making chemical building blocks, the compounds from which all other chemicals are made. A second program in this area focuses on reaction networks that are self-perpetuating, the simplest of which is an autocatalytic reaction, in which a molecule makes more of itself. Phillips plans to expand autocatalytic behavior into more complex reaction networks, with a goal of developing systems that provide useful functions and byproducts.

Prior to joining Penn State in the fall of 2008 as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry, Phillips worked from 2004 to 2008 as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the California State University, San Bernardino in 1999 and his doctoral degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004.