Alison Fout was selected as a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Chemistry. The Sloan Research Fellowship is an extremely competitive award. Nominees are from a pool of the very best U.S. and Canadian early-career scientists. "The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field."
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. In 2014, she was the recipient of a NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER Award). 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.