Congratulations to Hema Karunadasa on the Harry Gray Award

Recipients are honored for contributions of major significance to chemistry.

Congratulations to Hema Karunadasa on the Harry Gray Award for Creative Work in Inorganic Chemistry by a Young Investigator.  With the exception of the Arthur C. Cope Scholars, Hema will be among one of the recipients to be honored at the awards ceremony on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, in conjunction with the ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  

Karunadasa on her biggest research challenge: “As an assistant professor, I wanted to work on something completely different from my doctoral and postdoctoral work. So I plunged into a field that had fascinated me for years, but this was also a field in which I had no prior experience. Learning everything from scratch was challenging, but it kept things very interesting. There was never a dull moment during the first few years.”

Professor Karunadasa studied chemistry and materials science at Princeton University (A.B. with high honors 2003; Certificate in Materials Science and Engineering 2003), where her undergraduate thesis with Professor Robert J. Cava examined geometric magnetic frustration in metal oxides. She moved from solid-state chemistry to solution-state chemistry for her doctoral studies in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 2009) with Professor Jeffrey R. Long. Her thesis focused on heavy atom building units for magnetic molecules and molecular catalysts for generating hydrogen from water. She continued to study molecular electrocatalysts for water splitting during postdoctoral research with Berkeley Professors Christopher J. Chang and Jeffrey R. Long at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She further explored molecular catalysts for hydrocarbon oxidation as a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology with Professor Harry B. Gray.

The Karunadasa Group approaches solid-state materials using the tools of synthetic molecular chemistry and designs hybrid materials featuring properties of both molecules and extended solids. They target materials for applications in clean energy such as sorbents for environmental pollutants, electrodes for secondary batteries, phosphors for solid-state lighting, and absorbers for photovoltaics.

Professor Karunadasa joined the Stanford Chemistry Department faculty in 2012 and has been awarded a Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, the ICCC41 Rising Star Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a Terman Faculty Fellowship.