Bert Chandler, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at Penn State, recognized by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement as a recipient of the 2024 Cottrell Plus SEED -- Singular Exceptional Endeavors of Discovery -- Award. Credit: Penn State.
Chemistry and chemical engineering professor honored with 2024 Cottrell SEED Award
Sept 23, 2024
Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Penn State News.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Bert Chandler, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at Penn State, is one of 11 distinguished researchers recognized by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement as a recipient of the 2024 Cottrell Plus SEED (Singular Exceptional Endeavors of Discovery) Award.
Chandler received the Cottrell SEED Award for New Research Directions, a new category introduced this year, for his proposal titled “Beating Thermodynamics: Understanding How Spillover Protons Weaken CO2 Binding in Carbon Capture Materials." This award supports groundbreaking research with the potential to lead to transformative scientific discoveries, with each recipient receiving $60,000.
“The Cottrell Scholars are a highly selective group of teacher-scholars with research backgrounds in chemistry, physics, and astronomy,” Chandler said. “It is an honor to be recognized with an award from this outstanding group of researchers. This award will support a graduate and undergraduate student in my group, allowing them to spend a year following up on their recent discovery. We hope this will open a new area of research for us in CO2 capture.”
Chandler’s research group focuses on understanding key reactions for the green energy transition, which may help mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Their mission is to develop fundamental understanding of catalytic processes to enable the development of new solid catalysts to address pressing problems in environmental chemistry, waste reduction, energy conversion and storage, and climate change. They are developing the fundamental chemistry of solid-phase adsorbents and heterogeneous catalysts, which are used to transform molecules, changing their chemical functions and relative energies to solve critical energy and environmental needs. The team works to develop a deep fundamental understanding of how a particular system works, and then think creatively about how those fundamentals can be applied to new catalytic systems.
Chandler, a Cottrell Scholar since 2015, has been honored with the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2007 and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2005. Before joining the faculty at Penn State in 2021, he was a professor of chemistry at Trinity University and completed postdoctoral research in chemical engineering at the University of South Carolina. He earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1999 and a bachelor’s degree at Georgia Southern University in 1994.
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