NEW FACULTY

SPECIALIZING IN ELECTROCHEMISTRY, POLYMERIZATION AND SUPRAMOLECULAR AND INORGANIC CHEMISTRY, A TRIO OF NEW RESEARCHERS ARE SETTING UP SHOP IN THE DEPARTMENT.

Jacob Lessard

New faculty arrival Jacob Lessard focuses his research on the lifecycle of polymer materials from birth to death. “Using organic synthesis and controlled polymerization,” he says, “we aim to design materials from new mechanisms, low-energy manufacturing, and with built-in recycling techniques.” He found the Department of Chemistry at the U to be “fantastic”—a community “composed of competitive research groups, supportive faculty/staff, and somewhere I can see myself being successful.”

Incoming professors are faced with setting up a lab—the equivalent, one could argue, of a start-up. This happens while taking on a heavy load of teaching chemistry courses, ensuring their by-line in research journals, and doing service work, including joining department committees. It’s a tall order for anyone, but for Lessard his way forward is clear.

“My focus as a faculty member is on the generation of quality scientists both from the classroom and the laboratory,” he explains. “Using resources, such as trained postdoctoral researchers in the lab, I can balance my teaching/mentoring roles with external responsibilities.”

What does a well-functioning research group look like? For one thing, he says, it requires balancing teaching, mentoring, research, and funding. One thing leads to another until the self-sustaining circle is complete.

“Teaching educates students for research, students and postdoctoral researchers run the experiments, and experiments fund the laboratory, bring in new students, and transform current students to independent scientists. My job is to create this self-reinforcing group structure, teach the concepts in the classroom, guide the research and student researchers, and champion my students and the U. Any additional responsibilities will be passion projects and second to my role as a faculty member.”

Lessard knows about the hoops tenure-line faculty must jump through. Publishing is one of them.

“We will publish when we have something to teach the community,” he says. “Quality is imperative to my research group and will be the focus. Quantity is just a result of how quickly one can reach those standards.”

Long Luo

Bridging textbook chemistry with real-world applications is a premium for new faculty member Long Luo. Newly arrived as associate professor after a stint at Wayne State University beginning in 2017, Luo knows that sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case, the impetus for skill-building and lab know-how.

“When I taught the graduate-level electrochemistry class, the students in my class wanted to learn the lab skills because they needed to use them in their research projects,” he says. “So, I added a lab component to my graduate class. Providing students with what they want to learn fosters the engagement and participation of students.”

Luo works closely with graduate students and postdocs in his lab, ensuring the Luo Lab will make significant and positive impacts in the field of chemistry. A PhD graduate from the University of Utah’s Department of Chemistry, he is happy to return to the Beehive State.

“I enjoyed my stay as a graduate student,” Luo says, referring to his previous time at the U. “I had great interactions with our faculty. The staff were super supportive. I also enjoy the natural scenery in Utah. Overall, it is a great place to do science and live.” An electrochemist, he is keen on exploring interdisciplinary frontiers of chemistry.

“I expanded my research interests into new areas including organic synthesis, sensing, materials, and catalysis,” says Luo. “The Luo lab is collaborating with several other labs, including the White, Sigman, Anderson, and Minteer groups, because we are all in the NSF Center for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry. I think there are more collaboration opportunities in the department and outside.”

Luo was born and raised in a small city in China. He came to the US in 2009 for graduate school, completing his PhD under Professor Henry White. The focus of his PhD was mass transfer and electrochemistry at nanoscale.

~ CJ Siebeneck

Valerie Pierre

“My mother was a junior high science teacher,” explains new faculty member Valerie Pierre, a French national who, at age ten, moved with her family to Canada. “When I was young, I used to spend time after school waiting for her in the lab prep rooms of her school surrounded by all sorts of biology, chemistry, and physics lab equipment and specimens.” After school, her mother would demonstrate how the equipment worked and what it revealed about the subjects. “That's how I became a scientist.”

Following her PhD at UC Berkeley and postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology, Pierre began her independent career at the University of Minnesota before taking her current position at the U.

The Pierre lab focuses on molecular recognition and control of ions and nucleic acids, including their separation, transport and transformation. “Our research is driven by a desire to solve some of the biggest challenges in health and for the environment,” she says. Her team has developed a new dialysis membrane to treat hyperphosphatemia, one of the primary causes of mortality and morbidity for patients with chronic or advanced kidney diseases and a condition affecting nearly everyone on dialysis.

Pierre’s research ultimately links to her mentoring and teaching. “I've had great research ideas from teaching and vice versa,” she says. “Mentoring is something you learn by being mentored but also by looking at your mentors, collaborators and colleagues. So, it's something that happens all the time when you're doing everything else even when you don't realize it.”

As director of the new NSF Center for Chemical Innovation of Aqueous Supramolecular Chemistry (CASC), housed at the U, Pierre and her team of supramolecular and inorganic chemists is also taking their expertise to oceans, targeting two anions which are of great significance: bicarbonate and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). “Capturing, transporting and transforming bicarbonate enables us to directly remove carbon dioxide from oceans rapidly, easily and at a scale.”

Direct ocean capture is a key pillar to achieving net-zero emissions as there is 45 times more carbon dioxide in oceans than in the atmosphere. In contrast to bicarbonate, the PFOA anion is a very different species, one whose health and environmental hazards are becoming increasingly clear. Recognizing PFOA selectively and decomposing it easily is still an unmet challenge that must be overcome given the sheer size, complexity, and consequences of PFOA contamination, she explains.

Learn more about CASC at nsfcasc.com.