The Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society recognized three Illinois chemistry graduates for research excellence in the 2023-24 academic year.
The 2024 awardees of the RSC's Certificate of Undergraduate Research Excellence Award are Zachary Burke (BS, '24) and Ethan Ramirez (BS, '24). The Certificate of Undergraduate Excellence is the Royal Society of Chemistry’s recognition program for university students in North America who have shown significant achievement in the chemical sciences. The award recipients are selected by their departments for demonstrating exceptional dedication, performance, and engagement in coursework and research.
Burke was a double major in chemistry and astrophysics at Illinois and an undergraduate researcher in chemistry Prof. Mikael Backlund's lab where Burke worked on a quantum-inspired approach to super-resolution microscopy based on image inversion interferometry. Burke is a coauthor on a manuscript in the Backlund lab, and in fall 2024, will begin the PhD program in chemistry at MIT.
Ramirez was also the John David Barnwell Memorial Award winner at Illinois, which is presented to a student who exemplifies academic achievement along with a high personal standard of ethics and scholarship, a passion for teaching, and fluency in the arts. With a GPA over 3.9, Ramirez was integral to teaching in three different chemistry courses and played the viola in the University of Illinois Symphony Orchestra. Ramirez is continuing his education at the University of Illinois in the fall of 2024, where he will be working toward his Master's of Science in the Teaching of Chemistry degree.
And Zipeng Shen (BS, '24) received the 2024 American Chemical Society’s Undergraduate Award in Physical Chemistry for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The purpose of this award is to recognize outstanding achievement by undergraduate students in physical chemistry and to encourage further pursuits in the field.
Shen did undergraduate research under the advisement of chemistry Prof. Walter Klemperer, initially focusing on the isolation and structural characterization of several carbenium-polyoxometalate ion pairs. After taking the undergraduate physical chemistry courses, he became interested in theoretical chemistry, studying a phase transition involving inversion of PMo12O403- salts. Using the results of DFT calculations to determine the potential energy profile involved, he was able to model the phase transition as a soliton-like process. Shen started the chemistry graduate program at MIT this fall.
