Marshall Brennan (PhD, '15, Fout) has joined the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) as its new scientific director.
Brennan comes to SLAS from the American Chemical Society (ACS) where he served as the senior product manager of New Product Innovation. At the ACS Brennan founded and launched ChemRxiv, a preprint repository for chemistry. Prior to his role at ACS, Brennan served as associate editor for Nature Chemistry where he managed the peer review and publication process for journal submissions.
“I’m truly honored to be able to join SLAS in its mission to provide education, information and professional development to the large and thriving community of researchers and lab automation developers," Brennan said. "This is such an important moment in time for the growth of the field, and I am eager to find new ways to accelerate its advances and support its practitioners.”
As scientific director, Brennan will provide strategic leadership for knowledge content and delivery of scientific topics relevant to the Society and will have broad responsibility for associated programs and services including two technical journals – SLAS Discovery and SLAS Technology – and multi-channel educational programming and content.
In 2015, he earned his doctorate in chemistry at Illinois, publishing his thesis titled, “Mechanisms of multielectron redox catalysis with low-valent cobalt.” He conducted his postdoctoral work at the University of Texas at Austin studying C–C bond activation.
“The Society supports researchers in a wide array of different disciplines and industries. I am truly grateful for the diversity of interdisciplinary research areas — and collaborations between them — at the University of Illinois chemistry department for giving me the experience I need to be able to direct the growth of research in the science of discovery and automation," Brennan said.
He currently sits on the steering committee for the University of California, Los Angeles Applied Chemistry Advanced Degree Programs and serves as a Technical Advisory Board member for the Applied Chemistry MSc program. In 2018 Brennan was awarded the American Chemical Society's Catalyst Award and was nominated for the Forbes "30 Under 30" list.
SLAS is an international professional society of academic, industry and government life sciences researchers and developers and providers of laboratory automation technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.