Professor Prashant K. Jain, G. L. Clark Professor of Physical Chemistry, has been selected by the Coblentz Society to receive the 2025 Craver Award. The 2025 Craver Award will be presented to Jain this fall at SciX 2025.

The Coblentz Society created this award to recognize the efforts of young professional spectroscopists who have made significant contributions in applied analytical vibrational spectroscopy. The first Craver Award was presented in 2007.

The Society named this award for Clara D. Craver in recognition of her pioneering efforts in promoting the practice of infrared vibrational spectroscopy and her many years of service to the Coblentz Society. Clara Craver was the editor of the Coblentz Desk reference and other subsequent libraries that later became databases of infrared spectra. These libraries are the foundation for the application of modern vibrational spectroscopy. Her efforts resulted in the creation of the investment fund that supports the Coblentz Society and many of its annual awards.

Jain earned his PhD in physical chemistry working with M. A. El-Sayed at Georgia Tech, following which he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. After a Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is the G. L. Clark Professor of Physical Chemistry, a Professor in the Department of Chemistry, and a Professor in the Materials Research Laboratory. He is also a University Scholar and an Affiliate Faculty Member of Physics and the Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology (IQUIST).

Prof Jain’s lab studies nanoscale light–matter interactions and energy conversion. His noteworthy contributions are discoveries of plasmon resonances in quantum dots and plasmonic redox catalysis. His collective work has been published in over 120 papers and cited over 34,000 times. He has been listed among Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier Scopus.