UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ray Schaak, DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and professor of chemical engineering, has been awarded the 2025 F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS). The award recognizes outstanding achievements in synthetic inorganic chemistry. Schaak will be presented with the award at the spring 2025 ACS meeting in San Diego. This meeting will also feature a symposium in his honor that is being organized by four doctoral alumni of the Penn State Department of Chemistry.

Schaak’s research group works to develop and improve methods to create nanocrystals and other solid-state materials, including libraries of new materials with complex features. They identify bottlenecks that might slow or prevent the creation of materials that have practical and emerging applications. These diverse materials systems include stand-alone or integrated metals, metal alloys, metal oxides, metal chalcogenides, metal phosphides and metal borides that are relevant to applications in catalysis and energy conversion and storage. In addition to methods that overcome challenges to materials synthesis, the Schaak group aims to provide conceptually new approaches to materials synthesis, beyond the specific nanomaterials made in his lab. Their methods have also aided in the discovery of new materials with applications in sustainable and renewable energy technologies.

Schaak was previously honored with the ACS Akron Section Award in 2020, the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award in 2016, the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences in 2012, the National Fresenius Award in 2011, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award in 2007, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007, a Beckman Young Investigator Award in 2006 and a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2006. Schaak was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2017. In 2022, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from his undergraduate alma mater, Lebanon Valley College. Schaak serves as deputy editor for the journal ACS Nanoscience Au, associate editor of the journal ACS Nano and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Solid State Chemistry.

Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Schaak completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University and earned his doctoral degree at Penn State.