Keating Honored With Dreyfus Award

18 September 2006—Christine D. Keating, assistant professor of chemistry at Penn State, has received a Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation. This award is designed to provide external support to young faculty members during the early stages of their academic careers to assist them in continuing their high level of accomplishment in both research and education.

Keating's research has focused on the construction of functional materials from the bottom up, by control of their nanoscale and mesoscale features. Controlling the composition of matter at these length scales, she says, can lead to materials with entirely new and tailorable optical, electronic, and structural properties. She hopes such materials will find applications in medicine, biotechnology, sensors, nanoscale electronics, and in a variety of other fields.

Keating has published 49 scientific papers. She holds three patents related to her research, and has several additional patent applications pending. She previously received a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Unilever Award for Outstanding Young Investigator in Colloid and Surfactant Science, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship in 2004, and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003. She received a Roberts Graduate Fellowship from the Penn State Eberly College of Science in 1996, a Henkel Corporation Research Fellowship from the American Chemical Society Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry in 1996, a Eugene and Jane Apple Science Graduate Fellowship at Penn State in 1995, and a Paul Berg Award in Molecular Biology in 1993. She is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Biophysical Society, the Materials Research Society, and the Sigma Xi international scientific research society.

Keating was a lecturer in the High-School Teacher Training Workshops in 2002 and 2003, co-taught an Optical Microscopy Workshop as part of the Biomaterials and Biotechnology Summer Institute in 2003, and participated in a Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) Nanotechnology Camp in 2002. She also has served as a Faculty mentor for the Women In Science and Engineering Research (WISER) program at Penn State since 2002.

Keating earned her bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, in biology and chemistry at St. Francis College in Loretto, Pennsylvania, in 1991, having conducted undergraduate research at Syracuse University from 1989 to 1991. She earned her doctoral degree in chemistry at Penn State in 1997 and was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Chemistry from 1997 to 1999. She accepted a fixed-term faculty position in the department in 1999 and joined the Penn State faculty in the fall 2001.

[ L A K ]