The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation has announced the selection of Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars for 2025, including Illinois chemistry faculty member Nicholas E. Jackson.
The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences. Based on institutional nominations, the program provides discretionary funding to faculty within the first five years of their careers. Criteria for selection include an independent body of scholarship attained in the early years of their appointment, and a demonstrated commitment to education, signaling the promise of continuing outstanding contributions to both research and teaching. The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program provides an unrestricted research grant of $100,000.
The funding will support research in the Jackson Lab that focuses on a chemically transferable coarse-grained electronic structure model for polymers. The Jackson Lab works on problems at the interface of soft materials, quantum mechanics, and machine learning, with specific interests in the development of coarse-grained electronic structure models, conjugated materials theory, and polymer design. There is a strong emphasis on method developments that enable accelerated electronic predictions in disordered systems.
Jackson joined the Illinois chemistry faculty in 2021 and is an assistant professor of chemistry and leader of the AI for Materials Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology on the Illinois campus. He obtained his B.A. in Physics from Wesleyan University in 2011, followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern University in 2016, working with Prof. Mark Ratner and Prof. Lin Chen. He was subsequently a Named Fellow and Assistant Scientist in the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, working with Prof. Juan de Pablo.