Professor of Chemistry Chad Rienstra has been selected by the Research Corporation as a Cottrell Scholar for 2005-7. The recognition comes with a cash award of $100,000. Out of some 130 applicants in the fields of astronomy, chemistry, and physics, only 13 were selected. Professor Rienstra is the 11th Cottrell Scholar at UIUC, and "no other institution comes close" according to a representative of the Research Corporation. In the Department of Chemistry, Professor Rienstra joins David Gin, Martin Gruebele, Neil Kelleher, Yi Lu, Nancy Makri, Wilfred van der Donk, and Taekjip Ha (affiliate from Physics) as previous winners of this distinction from the UIUC Department of Chemistry. Mats Selen and Paul Selvin from Physics and Peter McCullough from Astronomy round out the total of 11 Cottrell Scholars at UIUC. Purdue University has the second largest number of Cottrell Scholars (five)."
Professor Rienstra received his B.A. degree in chemistry from Macalester College (St. Paul, MN) in 1993 and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and joined the faculty at Illinois in 2002. His research interests are in solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (SSNMR), including the development of new pulse sequence methodology and instrumentation, and application to studies of protein structure and dynamics. Professor Rienstra has also won an ACS Petroleum Research Fund Type G Award, a Research Corporation Research Innovation Award, an NSF CAREER award, and the 2005 Analytical Chemistry Award from Eli Lilly and Company.
Founded in 1912, the Research Corporation is dedicated to the advancement of science. It was established by Frederick Gardner Cottrell, scientist inventor and philanthropist, with the assistance of Charles Doolittle Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The Research Corporation's funds were initially derived from proceeds from Dr. Cottrell's invention, the electrostatic precipitator for controlling air pollution, and from inventions contributed by public-spirited scientists.
Frederick Gardner Cottrell once said "Bet on the youngsters; they are long shots, but many will pay off." Research Corporation is doing just that with its Cottrell Scholar Awards program. The awards, in the amount of $100,000, are made to teacher scholars in the physical sciences at Ph.D.-granting institutions. Eligibility is limited to scientists in the third year of their first tenure-track position. The program requires applicants to submit two proposals—ÂÂÂone for research and one for teaching. The research proposal is assessed for originality, feasibility and the prospect for significant fundamental advances to science. Ongoing contributions to education, especially at the undergraduate level, aspirations for future accomplishments in teaching, and the proposed strategies to achieve educational objectives are factors in the assessment of the teaching proposal. The Cottrell Scholar program was established in 1994. To learn more about the Cottrell Scholar Award, visit the website http://www.rescorp.org/grants.php#CSA.
A congratulatory announcement appears in the June 3, 2005 issue of Science magazine (opposite "Netwatch").