By: Sheila Evans
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Sarah King has been honored as a Beckman Foundation’s Young Investigator. The Beckman Young Investigator program provides support to early-career academics with a focus on research that seeks to develop new technologies, techniques, and methods in chemical and life sciences.
The Beckman Foundation recognized King’s research in developing a new type of spectrometer designed to measure the electronic structure and dynamics of buried interfaces. King explains that this novel technology could allow answers to many questions in chemistry such as, “What is the chemistry of iron oxide interfaces in water? How do we observe the electronic structure and dynamics of biological interfaces in the native liquid environment? How do catalysts work in realistic conditions?”.
Despite the ubiquity of interfaces and boundaries between materials, phases, and structural motifs in our natural and manufactured world, there is a very little we know about them as King points out, “It is very difficult to look at buried interfaces, and so we previously have used proxies to try to understand them. Current science often assumes that an interface underneath one layer of water molecules would behave and react the same way as one buried underneath one hundred layers of water molecules, but we don’t know that for sure”.
A new type of spectrometer would allow the study of mechanisms of charge and energy transfer at these different interfaces. “We are seeking to use interface-sensitive techniques rather than surface-sensitive techniques to look at what is happening at these boundaries,” says King.
Generous funding from the Beckman Foundation will allow King’s research team to pursue this novel idea further, “The Beckman Foundation is unique in that it seeks to fund high-risk, high-reward research into new techniques and methods in science. We are seeking to do interface-specific spectroscopy in a totally different way, which definitely fits the criteria” explains King, “Federal funding sources are great, but tend to be more risk-averse. The support from the Beckman Foundation will help us pursue what could be a transformative new technique in understanding interfaces”.
King is looking forward to continuing this research along with her team. “I view my research team as a collaborative enterprise. It is very important that we treat each other as colleagues and work together through discussion,” says King, “I’m lucky that I work with a phenomenal team and I am grateful for their help in putting together this idea and proposal”.