Vanessa Huxter receives NSF Career Award to shine light on chemical reactions

Feb. 21, 2023
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Vanessa Huxter

"This funding will also support the creation of inexpensive, portable 3D printed spectrometers, with the goal of helping local high school students from underrepresented communities explore the unique environment of the local Sonoran Desert," said Dr. Huxter.

Dr. Vanessa Huxter, assistant professor in the departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Physics in the College of Science, received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the foundation’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. She will receive $650,000 of funding over five years in the NSF's Division of Chemistry.

"As an optical spectroscopist, I am fascinated by light and by how we can use it to help us understand complex physical processes. Thanks to this award from the NSF, my research group and I will be able to explore how light can drive chemical reactions," said Dr. Huxter. "This work will help us design more efficient and environmentally sustainable catalysts and synthetic methods.”

Dr. Huxter's research is using advanced spectroscopic methods to study the initial steps of light-driven catalytic reactions that generate both simple and complex molecules under mild conditions. To understand how these reactions work, Dr. Huxter and her students in the Huxter Lab use pulses of light as short as a millionth of a billionth of a second (one femtosecond), to track the chemical species produced by light-triggered chemical reactions over a wide range of times.

"This funding will also support the creation of inexpensive, portable 3D printed spectrometers, with the goal of helping local high school students from underrepresented communities explore the unique environment of the local Sonoran Desert," said Dr. Huxter. "The experience of building an instrument and then using it to understand the world was transformative for me in my development as a scientist and I hope that these spectrometers can inspire a new generation of scientists. I am deeply grateful to the NSF for this award and eager to begin this exciting work."

Huxter's project will address the knowledge gap between the short lifetimes of intermediate radical species that are implicated in driving such reactions, and the longer timescales of diffusion required for those reaction to happen. Their discoveries could lead to a better understanding of catalysts used in the synthesis of industrially and pharmaceutically important chemicals that are otherwise difficult to produce.

"We are very excited that Dr. Huxter has received this significant recognition of her innovative research and outreach program, which also serves as a platform for student training and education," said Dr. Craig Aspinwall, Professor and Department Head of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UArizona. "This award will provide opportunities for students to engage in cutting-edge, high impact scientific inquiry focused on some of the most important problems facing society."

To learn more about the NSF and the CAREER program, click here.