New Faculty - 2022 Issue 1
Julie Fenton, assistant professor of chemistry, is a synthetic materials chemist. She plans to investigate fundamental and application-driven inquiries at the interface of inorganic and organic materials, pairing materials discovery with creative synthetic methods and high-level characterization tools.
Fenton’s previous awards and honors include an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Chemical Sciences from 2019 to 2021, being named an ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator in 2019, the Penn State Alumni Association Dissertation Award in 2018, and the Rustum and Della Roy Innovation in Materials Research Award from Penn State in 2018. Her research has been published in journals such as Science, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Chemistry of Materials.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Fenton was an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University from 2019 to 2021. Fenton earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at Penn State in 2018 and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Messiah College in 2014.
Danielle Reifsnyder Hickey, assistant professor of chemistry and of materials science and engineering, studies the atomic structure of nanomaterials using an imaging technique called aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM) as well as related electron microscopy techniques. In her recent work, she has investigated thin films of novel materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides and topological insulators. Specifically, she focuses on the mechanisms of how these films grow, variations in their structure, and how to engineer defects at the atomic scale to imbue special properties. She is also working in the areas of cryogenic and in situ TEM to understand biological systems and materials with energy-related applications.
Hickey received a Fulbright grant to perform research in Russia and a Best Research Award from the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures. Additional honors include being selected to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting as a young scientist and receiving fellowships such as the Ahmed Zewail Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania and an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship from the National Science Foundation. Her research has been published in journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, ACS Nano, Nano Letters, Physical Review Letters, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State as an assistant research professor in 2017, Hickey was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota from 2014 to 2017, a materials chemist on the battery research team at the medical device company Medtronic in 2014, and a visiting researcher at Ewha Womans University in South Korea in 2013. She earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and Russian language and culture at Duke University in 2006.
James Hodges, assistant professor of chemistry, studies the synthesis, characterization, and applications of crystalline inorganic solid materials. He uses a variety of synthetic tools to generate new materials in this area that could be used to speed up reactions and in energy-related applications.
Hodges has published his research in journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chemistry of Materials, and Angewandte Chemie.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Hodges was a research and development scientist at Honeywell UOP from 2019 to 2021 and a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University from 2016 to 2019. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at Penn State in 2016 and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Rider University in 2012.
Jonathan Kuo, assistant professor of chemistry, is an organometallic chemist, studying transition metal compounds bound to organic molecules, known as ligands. Kuo describes his work as biologically inspired organometallic chemistry and targets structural mimics of enzymatic active sites. He ultimately hopes to deepen scientists’ understanding of enzymatic catalysis.
Kuo’s previous awards and honors include a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2018 to 2021, the Arun Guthikonda Memorial Graduate Fellowship in 2017, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship from 2013 to 2016. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Organic Letters, and Organometallics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Kuo was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania from 2017 to 2021. He earned a doctoral degree at Columbia University in 2017 and a bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2012.
Stewart Mallory, assistant professor of chemistry, is a computational and theoretical chemist. His group is interested in soft active matter, an interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of chemistry, soft matter physics, and material science. The goal of the Mallory group will be to design the next generation of functional materials and microfluidic devices with applications ranging from the cleanup and neutralization of environmental pollutants to establishing design principles for self-propelled microtools.
Mallory’s previous awards and honors include being named a University of Chicago MRSEC Rising Star in Soft and Biological Matter in 2020, an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Sciences from 2019 to 2021, and an NSF-AGEP Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017 to 2019, and receiving the George Pegram Award for Meritorious Achievement in Chemical Research in 2017, the Jack Miller Teaching Award in 2014, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship from 2012 to 2015. His research has been published in journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society, The Journal of Chemical Physics, and Physical Review E.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Mallory was an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 2017 to 2021. He earned a doctoral degree in chemical physics at Columbia University in 2017 and bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and mathematics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2011.
Melanie McReynolds, Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Early Career Chair in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, studies metabolic vulnerabilities associated with aging, focusing on the molecule NAD+. This molecule is required by every living cell, and low levels have been linked to aging and a wide range of diseases, including type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. By studying the molecule’s metabolic origin and fate, she aims to identify how NAD+ is produced and consumed, in order to clarify—and someday counter—the causes of diseases and aging.
McReynolds’s awards and honors include being named an inaugural Fellow of the multi-institution Intersections Science Fellows Symposium in 2021, a Rising Star in Health Sciences Research in the field of metabolism by the University of Utah in 2021, a Hanna H. Gray Fellow by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2018, and a member of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Postdoctoral Research Enrichment Program in 2018. Her research has been published in journals such as Nature, Nature Metabolism, and Cell Reports.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, McReynolds was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University from 2017 to 2021. She earned a doctoral degree in biochemistry and molecular biology and a master’s degree in biological sciences, both at Penn State, in 2017 and 2011, respectively, and bachelor’s degrees in chemistry and physics at Alcorn State in 2009.
Lukas Muechler, assistant professor of chemistry and of physics, is an interdisciplinary scientist whose research lies at the interface between chemistry and physics in the field of quantum materials. His lab focuses on developing a conceptual and computational framework to facilitate the engineering, design, and characterization of new materials with exotic electronic properties. Muechler aims to develop and integrate methods into a versatile toolbox to study complex materials in a realistic setting.
Muechler’s previous awards and honors include a Procter Fellowship at Princeton University from 2017 to 2018, a Stephen P.A. Fodor *85 Fellowship at Princeton in 2014, and a schoarship from the National Scholarship Program of the German Federal Government in 2011. His research has been published in journals such as Nature Physics, Physical Review B, and Physical Review Letters.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Muechler was a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Quantum Physics at the Simons Foundation in New York City from 2018 to 2021. He earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at Princeton University in 2018 and a German diplom degree (equivalent to a U.S. master’s degree) in chemistry at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany, in 2013.
Elvira Sayfutyarova, assistant professor of chemistry, is a theoretical chemist who studies the electronic structure of complex chemical systems and particularly problems involving interactions between multiple electronic states. These include, for example, investigating mechanisms of photochemical reactions and organic reactions with transition metal catalysts, and studying electronic and magnetic properties of bioinorganic complexes occurring in nature.
Sayfutyarova received the American Chemical Society (ACS) Physical Chemistry Division Young Investigator Award in 2019, the Wiley Computers in Chemistry Outstanding Postdoc Award in 2019, the ACS Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award in 2017, and the Princeton Centennial Fellowship in 2012. Her research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Journal of Chemical Physics.
Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Sayfutyarova was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University from 2018 to 2021. She earned a doctoral degree in theoretical and computational chemistry at Princeton University in 2017 and a specialist degree (equivalent to a U.S. master’s degree) in chemistry from Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia in 2011.