Jiwoong Park Named Next Chair of Chemistry Department; John Anderson Named Associate Chair
The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Jiwoong Park will serve as the next chair of the department, effective August 1st.
As part of a new leadership initiative, Professor John Anderson has also been appointed Associate Chair by Dean of Physical Sciences Angela Olinto. Professor Anderson will aid the Chair in pursuing the department’s mission of excellence in research and education.
The department would like to thank and acknowledge outgoing Chair Viresh Rawal, who served two terms as Chair from 2015 to 2018 and 2021 to 2023, as well as previous Chair, Andrei Tokmakoff, who served from 2018 to 2021, for the numerous improvements they brought to the department during their tenure. Notably, we would like to thank Professor Tokmakoff for his exemplary leadership posed by the unprecedented challenges of the COVID pandemic. His rapid response and thoughtful actions were a source of stability during unstable times.
The past several years have brought exponential growth and change to the department. The department holds a top-ten position in U.S. News and World Report rankings. Research grant funding for the department has tripled over the last ten years. We introduced several exciting UChicago-led research centers, including Laura Gagliardi’s Energy Frontier Research Center, Dmitri Talapin's NSF Center for Chemical Innovation, and Greg Engel's NSF QuBBE Quantum Leap Challenge Institute. We successfully brought on seven new faculty members, including Laura Gagliardi, Sarah King, Mark Levin, Elena Shevchenko, Jack Szostak, Weixin Tang, and Anna Wuttig. Senior leadership was entrusted to Paul Alivisatos, a decorated scientist and alumni of the UChicago Chemistry Department, as President of the University in 2021. New instructional faculty including Shauna Mcleod and Hannah Lant have worked to renew our general chemistry offerings. We also added to our departmental staff with the recent hires of Ben Anderson, Brian Foley, Lilia Johnson, Josh Kurutz, and Bentley Wall, among others.
Additionally, our faculty have continued supporting our research excellence mission with awards and accomplishments. Among these, Mark Levin and Weixin Tang were awarded the Packard Fellowship; Mark Levin, Ray Mollering, and Brian Dickinson were awarded the Sloan Fellowship; Brian Dickinson, Suri Vaikuntanathan, and Mark Levin were named the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars; Sarah King was named Cottrell Scholar and Beckman Young Investigator; Laura Gagliardi, Giulia Galli, and Andrei Tokmakoff were elected to the National Academy of Sciences; Philippe Guyot-Sionnest and Norbert Scherer were elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science; Jiwoong Park and David Mazziotti were both named fellows of the American Physical Society; the CSA awarded Laura Gagliardi the 2023 Pauling Award, Bozhi Tian won the 2023 Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring, and Chuan He was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in 2022 for his research with RNA manipulation and crop production.
Our student population has also been thriving. Over the last decade, the department has increased undergraduate enrollment by 40%, while graduate enrollment has increased by 50%. Currently, 40% of our graduates report placement in Industry and Business, while another 40% report placement in Academia, such as Justin Caram (UCLA), Xiao Wang (MIT), and Guangxu Lan (PKU). Many new student initiatives have been introduced, including peer tutoring for first-year graduate students, a departmental climate committee, a substantial rework of the candidacy process, and a significant expansion of our student fellowship program to recognize the research excellence in our department. Our students have also earned awards across the university. In 2022, Ian Bongalonta won the Booth prize, while Sarah Litwin, Sandrine Legault, Katelyn Feuling, and Colin Lynch were all awarded the PSD prize. Both prizes recognize excellence in teaching.
Our successes have also come with their challenges. As the department has grown, the need to modernize our administrative structure has increased. Thus, a goal for the new leadership will be to delineate an administrative and infrastructure plan to account for our growth and position the department for future success. To accomplish this, the new leadership plans to foster a practice of open communication to ensure that the views and experiences of all stakeholders, including faculty, staff, postdocs and students, inform departmental decision-making processes. As such, the Chair would like to emphasize his and the Associate Chair’s commitment to make the department a supportive and enriching environment for everyone.
Jiwoong Park joined the faculty in 2016 after serving at Cornell from 2006-2016. An authority on nanomaterials, his research pursues the science and technology of atomically thin crystals that enable new and unexpected properties. Recent examples of such applications include few-atom-thick electrical circuits, optical waveguides, directed thermal conductors, and ion-separated membranes. In addition to his research and teaching duties, he has played an instrumental role in the department serving as the chair of the Graduate Program Committee, where he worked to improve many aspects of the program, including the candidacy exam.
John Anderson is an Illinois native who received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2008. He received his Ph.D. from Cal Tech in 2014 and joined the UChicago faculty in 2015. Professor Anderson studies transition metal chemistry to create materials with novel electronic properties and synthetic catalysts inspired by the reactivity of biological enzymes.