Thomas Mallouk Wins American Chemical Society's 2008 National Award in the Chemistry of Materials
Thomas Mallouk, Dupont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics at Penn State, has won the American Chemical Society's 2008 National Award in the Chemistry of Materials. The award is given to a person who "has made outstanding contributions to the chemistry of materials with particular emphasis on research relating to materials of actual or potential technological importance." The honor is bestowed during a special symposium at an American Chemical Society conference.
A solid-state chemist who perhaps is known best for applying inorganic materials to a broad range of problems in chemistry, Mallouk is one of the pioneers in research on the self-assembly of inorganic molecules. 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, they have 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. 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.
In 2007, Mallouk received the Penn State Schreyer Honors College Teaching Award. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society in 2006, and also received a Penn State Priestley Undergraduate Teaching Award that year. In addition, his work has been recognized with an Alpha Chi Sigma Outstanding Professor Award in 2003, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 1989, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1988, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1987, and an Exxon/American Chemical Society Solid-State Chemistry Award in 1986. He holds five patents and has submitted five additional patent applications.
Mallouk is the author or co-author of more than 280 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. He also co-founded Princeton Nanotech LLC in 2004 and serves on the board of directors of Lehigh Nanotech LLC.
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. Mallouk 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. In 1993 he joined the faculty at Penn State, 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.
CONTACTS:
Thomas Mallouk: (+1) 814-863-9637, tem5@psu.edu
Barbara Kennedy (PIO): (+1) 814-863-4682, science@psu.edu