Alison Fout has been selected to receive a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and grant of $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to support her research program. The prestigious awards provide up to five years of funding to junior faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research. Her award was given for her proposal on the development of cobalt(I) catalysts featuring strong-field ligands for C-X bond formation.

Professor Fout received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Gannon University in 2002 and a M.S. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2004. In 2009 she received her Ph.D. from Indiana University and was the 2010 recipient of the American Chemical Society Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award for her research at Indiana. From 2009-2012 she was both a Mary Fieser and NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University. Alison joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012. Her research focuses on the synthesis of ligand architectures that can support transition metal complexes capable of mediating unusual transformations for biological, environmental, and energy problems. A particular interest is using synthesis, reactivity, and mechanistic studies to understand the activation of small molecules by low-coordinate transition metal-ligand multiple bonds.

Excerpt from an email sent by Gregory Girolami