Department News
Dr. Ellen Matson wins Edith Flanigen Award 2018
August 9, 2018
Dr. Ellen Matson has been announced the winner of the 2018 Edith Flanigen Award. The Edith Flanigen Award is conferred annually by the CRC 1109 to an exceptional female scientist at an early stage of her career (postdoctoral fellow, junior researcher) for outstanding results on metal oxide water systems. It is associated with a financial support of 15,000 Euro, one third of which represents a personal award, while the other two thirds are meant to enable research stays within the surroundings of the CRC thus establishing collaborative links.
This years award ceremony is taking place at the 10th of October.
The Collaborative Research Centre 1109 (CRC 1109) is an interdisciplinary research platform bringing together scientists from four universities and three non-university institutions. It comprises research projects with a diverse expertise in chemistry and physics. The research aims at a comprehensive understanding of the complex atomic scale processes underlying oxide formation, structural evolution and dissolution. Exemplarily, silica, alumina and iron oxides will be studied as metal oxides with the highest natural abundance and application relevance. In the long term the research results will be useful to reach a rational synthesis of oxides with desirable properties, such as stability towards corrosion.
Academic Background
Dr. Ellen Matson studied chemistry and science education at Boston University, graduating, with honors, in 2009. Her PhD work was conducted in the laboratory of Suzanne C. Bart at Purdue University, where she studied the synthesis, characterization and reactivity of low valent uranium alkyl complexes. Following completion of her degree in 2013, Dr. Matson moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where she conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Alison R. Fout investigating the design of redox-active secondary coordination spheres for the activation of small molecules. For her excellence in graduate and postdoctoral research, Dr. Matson was awarded the Iota Sigma Pi Anna Louise Hoffman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Research (2013) and the American Chemical Society Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2014). In 2015, Dr. Matson started her independent career at the University of Rochester, where she is currently an assistant professor. In 2017, Dr. Matson was named the recipient of a NSF CAREER Award. More recently, in 2018 she was recognized in the Chemical Communications Early Investigator Issue and with a Course Hero Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching.
Research Interests
In her research, Dr. Matson investigates the synthesis and characterization of heterometallic metal-oxide clusters, combining her training in redox-active inorganic complexes with new directions in self-assembly synthesis in metal oxide clusters. Her interests primarily lie in the development of new molecules for applications in energy storage and the production of chemical fuels, specifically understanding how heterometallic structures can work cooperatively to mediate multielectron transformations.