Empowering Women in Science

The ACS East Central Illinois Women Chemists Committee was founded in the fall of 2005 to promote the development of women in the chemical sciences. With the support of our local ACS chapter and the University of Illinois Chemistry department, we have planned events that include professional and social opportunities that benefit graduate students, faculty, staff, and undergraduates. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to join.

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Featured Member - August 2009

Danielle Gray

Danielle was born in Southampton, England but moved to the United States shortly there after. She completed her B.A. in chemistry in 2001 at Augustana College, Rock Island. While at Augustana, she did summer research on solid solutions of mixed rare earth pyrochlores in the lab of Julia Chan at Louisiana State University. She did her Ph.D. in the lab of James Ibers at Northwestern University where she learned crystallography while doing research on solid-state rare earth and uranium chalcogenides. After finishing her Ph.D. in 2006, she moved floors and joined Mercouri Kanatzidis's group as a postdoc. There she spent two years studying incommensurate structures and charge density waves in intermetallic compounds with gallium square nets. Incommensurate materials have structural distortions that are ordered over a long range, which are not commensurate with the traditional unit cell. Higher dimensional crystallographic techniques are required to solve the long range ordering and model the true structure of the material.

In November 2008, Danielle became the director of the Materials Chemistry Lab and the G.L. Clark X-ray Facility. She looks forward to providing the same exceptional X-ray crystallographic services that the University of Illinois faculty and students have come to expect.

Do you have a nomination for a Featured Member of the Month? Did you or another WCC member recently publish a paper, receive an award, or present at a meeting? Let us know at wcc@scs.illinois.edu!