Professor Jeffrey Dick recognized with prestigious national award from the American Chemical Society
2024-08-26
Writer(s): Steve Scherer
Jeffrey E. Dick, Richard B. Wetherill Associate Professor of Chemistry, has been selected as the 2025 recipient of the American Chemical Society (ACS) National Fresenius Award sponsored by Phi Lambda Upsilon.
This annual award is presented to the top chemist or chemical engineer in the United States under the age of 35. The winner is expected to have attained national recognition in the areas of research, teaching and/or administration. Of the 59 winners since 1965, two are Nobel Prize winners and 28 are in the National Academy of Sciences.
The award was established in 1965 and named in recognition of Carl Remigius Fresenius, a revolutionary chemist whose work spanned fields of study.
Professor Dick’s pioneering work has made the immeasurable measurable. His most impactful work is the discovery that chemical reactions occurring presently within our cells are quite different from reactions studied in beakers (from enzyme rates to the spontaneous production of difficult-to-make molecules in microdroplets.)
His research group in the James Tarpo Jr. and Margaret Tarpo Department of Chemistry has offered solutions to pressing societal problems, such as developing deployable sensors for emerging micropollutants and illicit substances, understanding complex battery behavior, designing a new synthetic platform for high entropy alloy nanomaterials, and understanding how nature uses small-volume chemistry for the genesis and propagation of life. Since starting his independent career in 2018, Professor Dick’s group has published 97 original scientific papers, many of which are in high-impact journals and are changing thought on the frontiers of knowledge.
Professor Dick earned a BS in Chemistry from Ball State University and a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin studying under Professor Allen J. Bard.
A list of names of past National Fresenius Award recipients include former Purdue Chemistry faculty members Ben Freiser (1985), Ian Rothwell (1987), and Jillian M. Buriak (2001).
Professor Dick will be presented the award at the National ACS Meeting in Spring 2025 in San Diego, CA.
About Purdue Chemistry
The Tarpo Department of Chemistry is internationally acclaimed for its excellence in chemical education and innovation, boasting two Nobel laureates in organic chemistry, the #1 ranked analytical chemistry program, and a highly successful drug discovery initiative that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties.
About Purdue University
Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.