Two PhD graduates, Qi Hua and Falon Kalutantirige, were awarded the 2024 Klemperer Award for Outstanding Materials Chemistry Ph.D. Thesis in the Department of Chemistry.
In a special presentation to the department on May 9, 2024, Hua presented her thesis, “Understanding and Controlling the Reactivity of Oxygen Reduction and Methanol Oxidation Electrocatalysts,” and Falon presented her thesis, “Morphogenesis-Morphology-Function Relationships of Irregular Nanomaterials Using Advanced Electron Microscopy and Graph Theory.”
Advised by chemistry Prof. Andrew Gewirth, Hua began her graduate studies at Illinois in 2019 after completing a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at Lanzhou University. And Kalutantirige earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka, in 2017, and was advised at Illinois by materials science and engineering professor Qian Chen, who is also affiliated with the Department of Chemistry.