Biography

Dr. Sara Skrabalak received her B.A. degree in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 where she conducted research with Professor William E. Buhro. She was the recipient of the Sowden Award in undergraduate research from the Department of Chemistry. She then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she completed her Ph.D. degree in chemistry in fall of 2006 with the tutelage of Professor Kenneth S. Suslick. There, she was the recipient of the T.S. Piper Thesis Award for her work on porous materials. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington – Seattle with Professors Younan Xia and Xingde Li, designing nanomaterials for biomedical applications. She began her independent career in the Chemistry Department at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2008, where she was named the James H. Rudy Professor in 2015 and Robert & Marjorie Mann Chair in 2024. She is a recipient of both NSF CAREER and DOE Early Career Awards. She is a 2012 Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a 2013 Sloan Research Fellow, a 2014 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, and recipient of the 2014 ACS Award in Pure Chemistry and 2015 Baekeland Award. In 2017, she was named both a Fulbright Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow as well as the recipient of Research Corporation’s Frontiers in Research Excellence & Discovery Award. In 2020 Professor Skrabalak was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and assumed the roles of Editor in Chief for both Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Letters. Her research group focuses on nanomaterial design and synthesis for applications in catalysis, solar energy use, secured electronics, chemical sensing, and more (http://www.indiana.edu/~skrablab/).