Sarah King

  • Assistant Professor of Chemistry
  • Research and Scholarly Interests: Physical Chemistry, Materials Chemistry
  • Websites: King Lab Website, James Franck Institute
  • Contact: sbking@uchicago.edu
    (773) 834-3809
  • Office Location:
    Room E211, Gordon Center for Integrative Science, 929 E 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637

The King Lab at the University of Chicago seeks to uncover how interfaces and nanoscale material heterogeneity determine the ultrafast dynamics, properties, and functionality of materials. Interfaces and boundaries between materials, phases, and structural motifs influences material suitability for applications such as photovoltaics or light emitting diodes and can fundamentally change chemical reactivity at surfaces and through mechanisms of heterogeneous catalysis. The King Lab is a leader in developing new methodologies for probing spatial heterogeneity and interfaces in materials and using cutting edge techniques to elucidate the interplay between intrinsic and defect-mediated material dynamics. Our work has been extended to unveil new ways that imaging techniques pioneered for solid-state materials have the potential to revolutionize ultrastructural biology and neuroscience.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.S.
2010

University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D.
2015

Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society
Postdoctoral Fellow
2018

The University of Chicago
Assistant Professor


Calvin Raab, Janek Rieger, Atreyie Ghosh, Joseph L. Spellberg, Sarah B. King. "Surface Plasmons in Two-Dimensional MXenes" The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 2024 15 (46), 11643-11656. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.4c02882


Ashley Arcidiacono, Cooper R. Johnston, Clare L. Keenan, Nasim Mirzajani, Anoushka Ghosh, Alexander S. Filatov, Sarah B. King. "Functionalization of Monolayer MoS2 with Layered Multimolecular Architectures" ACS Applied Optical Materials 2024 2 (9), 2011-2018 DOI: 10.1021/acsaom.4c00327


Ghosh, Atreyie, et al. “Polarization-Dependent Photoemission Electron Microscopy for Domain Imaging of Inorganic and Molecular Materials.” The Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 161, no. 11, 16 Sept. 2024, DOI: 10.1063/5.0225765.


R. Li, G. Wildenberg, K. Boergens, Y. Yang, K. Weber, J. Rieger, A. Arcidiacono, R. Klie, N. Kasthuri, S. B. King, ChemBioChem 2024, 25, e202400311. https://doi.org/10.1002/cbic.202400311


Joseph L. Spellberg et al. ,Electronic structure orientation as a map of in-plane antiferroelectricity in β′-In2Se3.Sci. Adv.10,eado2136(2024).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.ado2136


Nasim Mirzajani, Clare L. Keenan, Sarah R. Melton, and Sarah B. King, "Accurate phase detection in time-domain heterodyne SFG spectroscopy," Opt. Express 30, 39162-39174 (2022) DOI:10.1364/OE.473098


Prakriti P. Joshi, Ruiyu Li, Joseph L. Spellberg, Liangbo Liang, Sarah B. King. "Nanoimaging of the Edge-Dependent Optical Polarization Anisotropy of Black Phosphorus". Nano Letters 2022 22 (8), 3180-3186. DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c03849

Kavli Fellow

NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award
2024

Cottrell
2023

AFOSR Young Investigator Program Award
2022

DOE Early Career Award
2021

Beckman Young Investigator
2020

Neubauer Family Assistant Professorship
2018

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
2015

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
2010

Cottrell Scholar
Research Corporation for Science Advancement
2023

King Lab pioneer technique to visualize anti-ferroelectric materials

John Anderson and Sarah King organize 3rd South Side Science Festival

Sarah King and Chicago universities team up to map the brain

Beckman Foundation revisits Sarah King's spectroscopic research