Chemist Eric Schelter Wins 2024 Cottrell SEED Award

Eric Schelter, Hirschmann-Makineni Professor of Chemistry, is one of 11 researchers selected by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement to receive its Cottrell Plus SEED (Singular Exceptional Endeavors of Discovery) Awards for 2024. Each award is $60,000.

The competitive Cottrell SEED Award is designed to support members of the Cottrell Scholar community in high-impact research activities. This year, RCSA expanded SEED Awards to include two categories: New Research Directions and Exceptional Opportunities. Shelter’s award was for New Research Directions, which supports innovative research projects with potential to lead to a transformative line of inquiry. Schelter’s SEED project is New Directions for Sustainable Separations of Battery Materials.

Schelter’s research focuses mostly in synthetic inorganic and organometallic chemistry to address problems in critical metals separations, develop new materials with quantum properties, understand the roles of f-elements in biology, and gain insight into their unique chemical bonding. Among his many honors, he has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, received the American Chemical Society Inorganic Chemistry Lectureship Award and the Anders Gustaf Ekeberg Tantalum Prize, and served as an editorial advisory board member on the American Chemical Society journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering.

Since 1994, the Cottrell Scholar program has honored and helped to develop outstanding teacher-scholars who are recognized by their scientific communities for the quality and innovation of their research programs and their potential for academic leadership.

Research Corporation for Science Advancement is a private foundation that funds basic research in the physical sciences (astronomy, chemistry, physics, and related fields) at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada.