Page 13 - UMN Chemnews December 2020
P. 13

 Connie Lu promoted to professor
  Connie Lu
CONNIE LU has been promoted to full professor, effec- tive in the fall of 2020. She started with the Department of Chemistry in 2009 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2015. She earned her doctorate at the California Institute
of Technology and her Bachelor of Science degree at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry.
Lu’s research is at the interface of inorganic and organo- metallic chemistry, energy and catalysis, and environ- mental and green chemistry. Her research methods
encompass synthesis, spectroscopy, and theory. Researchers in her group are interested in creating, understanding, and exploiting new chemical bonding involving a transition metal center. Current research initiatives include configuring new bonds between first- row transition metals; deliver-to-order bimetallic active sites in metal-organic frame- works; and innovating bimetallic active sites for small-molecule activation.
One project that her research group is working on involves developing homogeneous catalysts for converting abundant small molecules such as N2 and CO2 into use-
ful chemical feedstocks. A big challenge in developing such catalysts is promoting multi-electron and proton-coupled reactivity. The researchers’ general approach is to create and test ligand designs that abet transition metals in transferring the electron and/or proton equivalents needed in small-molecule reduction. The ligands are ideally designed to quickly build a large family of potential transition-metal catalysts that can be screened for catalytic activity in a rapid and efficient manner.
Professor Lu is an author on 60+ refereed journal articles and two book chapters and has conducted 100+ invited seminars. She is a member of the American Chemical Society and the Royal Chemical Society and has served as a mentor to future scientists at the national and local level, including advising four post-doctoral researchers, 18 graduate students, and 5 master’s students. She also teaches a number of courses such as general chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and bioinorganic chemistry.
She is a co-principal investigator for the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center and is a member of the Center for BioInorganic Chemistry and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute at the University of Minnesota.
Her honors and awards include being named an outstanding reviewer for Chemical Society Reviews for two consecutive years; being featured in an American Chemical Society virtual issue as a Journal of the American Chemical Society Young Investigator and another issue as one of the top young synthetic inorganic chemists; giving plenary lectures at the Royal Society of Chemistry Dalton Conference and the Advance Photo Source User meeting; being chosen as the Inorganic Chemistry Young Outstanding Upcoming Speaker for the Symposium on Advanced Biological Inorganic Chemistry in Kolkata and for the Gerhard and Lisolette Closs Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago. Lu is also the recipient of a Kavli Fellow, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment Early Career Award.
                         cse.umn.edu/chem 13
   Jessica R. Lamb
Jessica Lamb joins chemistry
faculty
JESSICA R. LAMB joined the Department of Chemistry as an associate professor in July 2020.
Jessica was born in Madison, WI, before growing up in Fargo, ND, and spend- ing significant time around lakes in Minnesota during the summer. She then moved farther north to Grand Forks, ND, where she attended the University of North Dakota. While there, she played in multiple bands, worked as a stage- hand at the local theatre, and founded the swing dancing club. She performed undergraduate research in organometallic chemistry in the laboratory of Professor Irina Smoliakova. During the summers, she studied abroad in Spain, taught at a local performing arts school, and worked in the lab of Professor Victoria Johnston- Gelling in the Coatings and Polymeric Materials Department at North Dakota State University.
After graduating with her Bachelor of Science in chemistry, summa cum laude, in 2012, Lamb moved to Ithaca, NY, for graduate school at Cornell University. When she wasn’t participating in competitive ballroom dancing, she was conducting research on small molecule catalysis with Professor Geoffrey Coates as a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow. She gradu- ated with her doctorate in 2017, before studying polymers and photochemistry
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