Mallouk Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

5 December 2006—Thomas E. Mallouk, DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. The honor is given to members whose "efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.” The award will be presented to 449 individuals during the 2007 AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California.

Mallouk is a solid-state chemist who is perhaps best known for applying inorganic materials to a broad range of problems in chemistry. He is one of the pioneers in research on self-assembly of inorganic molecules. He and his students showed in 1988 that inorganic crystal lattices can be grown one layer at a time on surfaces by wet chemical techniques. Since then, they have used this approach to make surface structures for artificial photosynthesis, chemical sensing, and the separation of left-handed and right-handed forms of the same molecule—known as enantiomers. Currently, his group is using surface chemistry to tackle problems in molecular electronics, environmental remediation, and catalytic energy conversion.

Mallouk’s work has been recognized with National Science Foundation Creativity Awards in 1998 and 2004, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 1989, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1988, a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1987, an Exxon/American Chemical Society Solid-State Chemistry Award in 1986, and a Regents Fellowship from the University of California in 1982. He holds five patents and has submitted five additional patent applications.

Mallouk is the author or co-author of more than 250 research publications and has edited four books on solid-state synthesis, interfacial chemistry, and chemical sensors. He has been associate editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 1996, and has served on editorial boards for the Journal of Solid State Chemistry and Advanced Functional Materials since 2000. He also served on the editorial advisory boards of Chemistry and Materials from 1995 to 1999, the Canadian Journal of Chemistry from 1996 to 1999, the Accounts of Chemical Research from 1997 to 1999, and NanoLetters from 2000 to 2003. He has been Chief Scientist for NuVant Systems, Inc., since 2000. He also co-founded Princeton Nanotech, LLC, in 2004 and serves on the board of directors of Lehigh Nanotech, LLC, founded in 2006.

Mallouk earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Brown University in 1977 and a doctoral degree in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He joined the Penn State faculty in 1993 as professor of chemistry. In 1998, he was named the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry, and he was named professor of physics in 2004.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Mallouk was a member of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin as assistant professor from 1985 to 1989, associate professor from 1989 to 1991, and professor from 1991 to 1993. He had been a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1983 to 1985, and was a chemist with the Singer Corporate Research and Development Laboratories from 1977 to 1978.

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