Thomas Mallouk Named Evan Pugh Professor
Thomas Mallouk, the DuPont professor of materials chemistry and physics at Penn State University, has been named an Evan Pugh professor, the highest distinction that Penn State can bestow upon a faculty member.
Named after Penn State's first president, this award is given to faculty members whose research publications and creative work or both are of the highest quality over a period of time; who are acknowledged national and international leaders in their fields as documented by pioneering research or creative accomplishments; who are recipients of prestigious awards; and who demonstrate excellent teaching skills with undergraduate and graduate students.
Mallouk is one of the pioneers in research on the self-assembly of inorganic molecules, a solid-state chemist who is highly regarded for his research in applying inorganic materials to a broad range of problems in chemistry. He and his students showed in 1988 that inorganic crystal lattices can be grown one layer at a time on surfaces by wet chemical techniques. Since then, his lab has used this approach to make surface structures for artificial photosynthesis, chemical sensing, and the separation of left-handed and right-handed forms of the same molecule, which is a critical step in many applications. Currently, his group is developing new materials to address problems in photochemical energy conversion, nanoscale electronics, catalysis, chemical sensing, environmental remediation, and powered movement on the nanometer length scale.
His work has been recognized with an an Exxon/American Chemical Society Solid-State Chemistry Award in 1986, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1988, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 1989, Alpha Chi Sigma Outstanding Professor Award in 2003. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society in 2006. He also received a Penn State Priestley Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2006, followed by the Penn State Schreyer Honors College Teaching Award in 2007. Mallouk won the American Chemical Society National Award in the Chemistry of Materials in 2008 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009. He holds a number of patents for innovations that resulted from his research.
Mallouk is the author or co-author of over 300 research publications and has edited four books on solid-state synthesis, interfacial chemistry, and chemical sensors. He has been associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 1996, and has served on editorial boards for the Journal of Solid State Chemistry, Advanced Functional Materials, Chemistry and Materials, the Canadian Journal of Chemistry, the Accounts of Chemical Research, and NanoLetters. He has been Chief Scientist for NuVant Systems Inc. since 2000. Mallouk has also been the director of the Center for Nanoscale Science, a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center supported by the National Science Foundation, since 2005.
Mallouk earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Brown University in 1977 and a doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He was a member of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin as assistant professor from 1985 to 1989, associate professor from 1989 to 1991, and professor from 1991 to 1993. He joined the faculty at Penn State in 1993, and in 1998 he was named the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry, an honor with which he received a medal from the Penn State Eberly College of Science. He also was named a professor of physics in 2004.