Inorganic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Raymond Schaak, Penn State University
About the Seminar
Design and synthesis of compositionally complex nanoparticle libraries
The design and synthesis of nanoparticles of inorganic materials underpins technological developments across many application areas. For example, the ability to prepare a wide range of nanoparticles with controlled shapes, sizes, compositions, and crystal structures enables the discovery and optimization of catalysts for clean energy technologies that include fuel cells, solar cells, and batteries. Historically, the synthesis of inorganic nanoparticles is carried out in a target-oriented manner, where a synthetic protocol is developed and optimized to achieve the highest possible yield of a specific product. To accelerate materials discovery, researchers often turn to combinatorial synthesis and screening or computational predictions, both of which can provide thousands to millions of possible options. However, the scope of materials that can be surveyed by computational prediction and screening far exceeds, by many orders of magnitude, the scope of materials that can be made in the laboratory in sufficient quantities to experimentally interrogate. Likewise, discoveries that emerge combinatorially can be difficult to scale up to isolatable quantities. This talk will highlight our recent efforts in developing nanoparticle libraries that match the scope of typical combinatorial discovery and computational screening efforts and that also can be readily synthesized in high yield and in isolatable quantities. We focus on compositionally complex alloy, intermetallic, chalcogenide, and oxyhalide systems, including high-entropy materials, that are relevant to clean energy technologies as potential catalysts and semiconductors.
About the Speaker
Dr. Raymond Schaak is the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at Penn State University. Dr. Schaak also has a Courtesy appointment in the Chemical Engineering Department at Penn State and is part of the Penn State Materials Research Institute. Dr. Schaak received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Lebanon Valley College in 1998. In 2001, he received a Ph.D. in materials chemistry from Penn State University under the direction of Professor Thomas Mallouk, where he demonstrated the concept of solid-state retrosynthesis for the stepwise and predictable topotactic synthesis of bulk and nanostructured perovskite oxide materials. From 2001–2003, he was a postdoctoral research associate with Professor Robert Cava at Princeton University, where he worked on the synthesis and physical property characterization of metal carbide, boride, phosphide, oxide, and alloy superconductors. In 2003, Dr. Schaak began his independent career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. In 2007, he moved to Penn State University as an Associate Professor of Chemistry and was promoted to Professor in 2011. Dr. Schaak was appointed as the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in 2013. His research group focuses on developing new chemical strategies for the synthesis of nanoscale solid-state materials and applying these materials to problems at the forefront of modern materials research. Dr. Schaak has received several prestigious awards, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1999), an NSF CAREER Award (2006), a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2006), a DuPont Young Professor Grant (2006), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2007), a Research Corporation Scialog Award for Solar Energy Conversion (2010), the National Fresenius Award (2011), the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences (2012), the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award (2016), the ACS Akron Section Award (2020), and the F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry (2025). In 2017, Dr. Schaak was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and in 2022, Dr. Schaak received the Lebanon Valley College Distinguished Alumnus Award, which is one of LVC’s highest honors. Dr. Schaak served as Awards Committee co-chair of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry (ACS DIC) from 2007–2011 and as chair of the ACS DIC Nanoscience subdivision in 2013. Dr. Schaak also served on the Cottrell Scholar Selection Committee of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Solid State Chemistry, and is both an Associate Editor of ACS Nano (since 2010) and the inaugural Deputy Editor of ACS Nanoscience Au, which launched in 2021.