Prof. Prashant Jain has been awarded a 2026 Langmuir Lectureship by the American Chemical Society Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry and the Langmuir journal.
Jain was selected for the honor for, among other things, "pioneering multielectron redox catalysis by plasmonic surfaces and producing new insights into surface-mediated chemical reactions using single-molecule-level vibrational spectroscopy."
The Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry of the American Chemical Society presents the Langmuir award annually at the American Chemical Society National Meeting. Jain, G. L. Clark Professor of Physical Chemistry, will deliver his Langmuir Lecture at the ACS Fall Meeting in Chicago (August 23-27).
Jain and his group experimentally and theoretically investigate nanoscale light-matter interactions. They confine light using nanostructures and use these concentrated photons for inducing novel chemical reactivity, powering the synthesis of fuels and chemicals, and deciphering how catalysts function at the atomic level. His laboratory has discovered plasmon resonances in quantum dots and new crystal phases that exist only on the nanoscale.
Irving Langmuir (31 January 1881 – 16 August 1957) was an American chemist and physicist, who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in surface chemistry. He was the first industrial chemist to become a Nobel laureate. The American Chemical Society Journal for Surface Science is named Langmuir in his honor.