FACULTY UPDATES
T. Don Tilley named inaugural PMP Tech Chancellor’s Chair in Chemistry We are very grateful to Rubber and Joy Chen for their gift of $3.6M to establish the PMP Tech Chancellor’s Chair in Chemistry. The Chen’s gift of $3M allows the College to take advantage of a special University match. Combined with these matching funds, their generous gift creates a permanent assistant professor position in the College of Chemistry, and a Chair to be awarded to a tenured professor. $600K will be used to assist with the lab start-up costs for the new assistant professor. Recruitment for the new faculty member is underway.
Thanks to a generous donation from Rubber and Joy Chen of PMP Tech, an international company based in Taiwan, chemistry professor and Senior Scientist at Berkeley Lab, T. Don Tilley has been announced as the inaugural PMP Tech Chancellor’s Chair in Chemistry PMP Tech was founded in 1978 in Taiwan. With an extensive international clientele, the company focuses on product lines that include: Functional elastomers (silicone/rubber); dissimilar material bonding (silicone rubber bonded with metal, plastic, textile, glass etc.); silicone rubbers with precise dimension; medical grade products and other products. Professor Tilley’s group focuses on discovery of new chemical processes and materials designed to impact technologies in energy and sustainability. These efforts include aspects of inorganic, organometallic, silicon, and materials chemistry, with emphasis on exploratory syntheses and transition metal-based catalysis. Projects in his group have produced soft materials such as silicon-based polymers and nanocarbon assemblies, and hybrid organic-inorganic materials that exhibit high selectivities as heterogeneous catalysts. Research on the
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conversion of solar energy to chemical fuels has led to an understanding of the key water-splitting reaction at metal-oxygen clusters. Progress in all these areas is supported by fundamental investigations into mechanism, structure and bonding. Professor Tilley said of the appointment, “I am very honored to be recognized with this chaired position and am grateful to PMP Tech for their interest in promoting soft materials research at Berkeley. This Chair is a tribute to the students and postdocs in my research group who have made fundamental contributions to advance silicon and organic materials chemistry.”
