Subotnik a Finalist for National Chemistry Award
Joseph Subotnik, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Chemistry, is a finalist for the 2019 Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientists. Subotnik is one of just 31 “rising stars in science” selected as finalists out of 343 nominations from 169 academic and research centers. Three Blavatnik National Laureate Awards will be given, in the categories of chemistry, physical sciences and engineering, and life sciences. Each of the three laureates will win $250,000—the world’s largest unrestricted prize for early-career scientists.
Subotnik is a theoretical chemist who has made significant advances in the area of modeling electronic relaxation: the relaxation of electrons into their least energetic state. This provides one of the few practical and rigorous means of modeling catalytically active and photo-excited materials. The announcement reads, “Subotnik’s work has made significant strides towards closing the gap between accurate theoretical chemistry models and experimentally obtained results.”
His previous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Career Advancement Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE), a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, the Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.
The Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists were established by the Blavatnik Family Foundation in the United States and are administered by the New York Academy of Sciences. By the close of 2019, the Blavatnik Awards will have conferred prizes totaling over $8.4 million to 285 outstanding young scientists and engineers from more than 44 countries, representing 35 scientific and engineering disciplines.
The 2019 Blavatnik National Laureates and finalists will be honored at the Blavatnik National Awards ceremony on September 23, 2019, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
