Three faculty members in the Department of Chemistry have received promotions. Josh Vura-Weis has been promoted to full professor by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And Hee-Sun Han and Lisa Olshansky have been promoted to associate professor and awarded tenure by the university. This summer, the University of Illinois Board of Trustees approved the promotions of all three professors.
Josh Vura-Weis
Professor Vura-Weis has been a member of the Illinois chemistry faculty since 2013, conducting research in the areas of inorganic, materials, and physical chemistry. His research group uses advanced laser techniques to study the excited-state electronic and vibrational dynamics of inorganic and organometallic chromophores and photocatalysts. In 2023, the American Chemical Society awarded Vura-Weis the Richard Van Duyne Early Career Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry. He is also Associated Head of Major Projects in the Department of Chemistry and a professor with the Materials Research Laboratory at Illinois.
Vura-Weis received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1999, then worked for several years as a software developer before making the decision to return to academic research. He interned with Edward I. Solomon at Stanford University learning how electronic structure calculations can complement sensitive experimental techniques. He moved to Northwestern University, where he worked with professors Mike Wasielewski and Mark Ratner as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and completed his Ph.D. in 2009. He worked in the lab of Steve Leone at the University of California-Berkeley as an NSF ACC-F Postdoctoral Fellow.
Hee-Sun Han
Professor Han obtained her B.S. degree in Chemistry from the College of Natural Sciences at Seoul National University, Korea, where she graduated summa cum laude and as a Valedictorian. After college, she moved to Cambridge, USA to pursue graduate work in Physical Chemistry at MIT as a Samsung and KASF fellow. Under the guidance of Prof. Moungi G. Bawendi, she developed new quantum dot based imaging probes and a QD-based, phenotypic, intravital cytometric imaging platform. She then moved to Harvard to work with Prof. David A. Weitz as a postdoctoral fellow. At Harvard, she developed a drop-based microfluidic platform for high throughput genome sequencing. Han joined the Illinois chemistry faculty in 2017 as the Mark A. Pytosh Scholar. Her group develops and implements new bioanalytical technologies to dissect molecular and cellular mechanisms driving the ensemble behavior of complex biological systems.
Lisa Olshansky
After earning her B.S. in Chemistry from UC San Diego in 2009, Professor Olshansky completed her Ph.D. in Chemistry at MIT in 2015 as an NSF Graduate Research and Presidential fellow under the mentorship of Profs. Daniel Nocera and JoAnne Stubbe. She then went on to work with Prof. Andy Borovik at UC Irvine as an ACS Irving S. Sigal Postdoctoral fellow. In 2018, Lisa began her independent career as an Assistant Prof. of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where her team is working to mimic and exploit mechanisms in which macroscopic structural control is used to control the properties of metal centers. During her early career, Olshansky has been recognized with Searle, Cottrell, and Vallee Scholars awards, Carver Trust and DOE Young Investigator awards, and an NIH Early Stage Investigator award. Olshansky was recently named an NAS Kavli Fellow, received the Paul Saltman Young Investigator Award for her research on Metals in Biology, and was recently named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awardee. Finally, since joining the faculty at Illinois, Olshansky has spearheaded an initiative called C2 that aims to foster inclusivity and diversity in the School of Chemical Sciences.