Professor Prashant K. Jain has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation CAREER award. Each year, the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research.
The five-year award of $655,580 will fund Jain's mechanistic investigations into how light energy is converted into chemical energy within metallic nanostructures. This process, if properly understood and controlled, can become a candidate technology for capturing solar energy and for driving energy-intensive processes in the chemical industry with light.
Research in Jain's group exploits light-matter interactions to image catalyst and photocatalyst surfaces with unprecedented resolution, induce molecules and materials to exhibit non-natural optical phenomena, and uncover solid-state phenomena in complex materials.
Dr. Jain joined the University of Illinois faculty in 2011. Subsequently, he has been the recipient of numerous other awards including a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, a Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Golden Jubilee Visiting Fellowship, a National Academy of Engineering E21 Innovator, a DuPont Young Professor Award, a Unilever Award for Outstanding Young Investigator, MIT Technology Review TR35, Beckman Young Investigator Award, plus others.
Professor Jain may be contacted at jain@illinois.edu.
His group web site is: http://nanogold.org/