Prof. Maria SantoreUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst
Maria Santore is a Professor of Polymer Science and Engineering, with a secondary appointment in Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Research in the Santore group aims, through its focus on soft material interfaces, to discover new interfacial behaviors and mechanisms and to translate new quantitative understanding to tangible scientific and technological advances. Projects focus on soft materials in which relatively weak interactions allow reconfigurations in response to moderate forces, or in which interesting molecular behaviors produce new properties. Her work on biomimetic membranes has led to the discovery of tension-controlled phase transition. Translating from biomembranes to the materials arena, the Santore lab has developed tension controlled assembly and crystallization processes that produce materials with responsive hierarchical patterns. Her manipulation of adhesion driven by discrete interfacial features has provided a contrast to systems governed by classical DLVO interactions and she has extended these concepts to materials that control cellular adhesion, useful to limit infections or as collection devices for biofluid specimens. She has developed new materials and processes specifically for the manipulation of particles and cells, holding 5 patents. Santore was trained formally as a Chemical Engineer, obtaining her B.S. at Carnegie Mellon. Originally pursuing in a pre-med track in Chemical Engineering at CMU, her interests redirected sharply when she took a class on Colloids and Surfaces taught by Geoff Parfitt. Following completion of an undergraduate concentration in colloids, polymers, and surfaces at CMU, she pursued fascinating problems involving polymers at interfaces, starting with her Ph.D. studies in the Russel Group at Princeton. Her graduate work, supported by NSF and DuPont fellowships addressed how polymer-particle interactions direct the phase behavior and rheology of colloidal suspensions. Santore’s postdoctoral studies of polymer glasses and blends in the Polymer Division at NIST were supported by an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and extended her interests to far from equilibrium systems. Santore joined the Chemical Engineering Department at Lehigh University as the Dana Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and was promoted to Associate Professor in subsequent years. There she built one of the first total internal reflection fluorescence instruments for the study of interfacial dynamics in materials, in the days before digital cameras existed. Her extension of this methodology to protein denaturing kinetics and its influence on bioadhesion was one of her early influential works. She was awarded the Alfred Nobel Robinson Award for outstanding research in 1996 and was named the Class of 1961 Chaired Associate Professor while at Lehigh. Following a sabbatical at the Institute for Medicine and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania she joined the University of Massachusetts Department of Polymer Science and Engineering as a Full Professor. For 13 years, Santore served as a senior editor of Langmuir, the ACS (American Chemical Society) Journal of Surfaces and Colloids, and currently serves as a section editor for the Elsevier Journal Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science. Holding the belief that STEM and our society must be strengthened by the inclusion of all groups in the research endeavor, Santore regularly seeks opportunities to increase Diversity in STEM. This has included her creation and leadership of the STEM Family Travel Initiative of UMass and the Five Colleges. From 2010-2018 this innovative center supported women and increased work-life balance in academia by removing travel-related barriers to all researchers with family-care responsibility. The program provided education, advocacy, analysis of travel impact, and flexible resources enabling a tailored approach for academic caregivers, including direct caregiver grants and access to a provider network across the US, including resources at professional societies. Santore is a Fellow in the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Chemical Society. She was awarded the 2015 Hopper Lectureship in Engineering by the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018 she was the UMass Distinguished faculty lecturer and was awarded the UMass Chancellor’s Medal.
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Prof. Catherine MurphyUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Catherine J. Murphy holds the Larry R. Faulkner Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and is presently the Head of the Department of Chemistry there – the first woman to hold that position in the Department’s 153-year history. Murphy grew up first in northern New Jersey and then in the Chicago suburbs. She was fortunate in that both her eight-grade and high school chemistry teachers in the Chicago area were knowledgeable and full of enthusiasm for their subject; so upon matriculating, she started at UIUC as an undergraduate in 1982, enrolling as a biochemistry/chemistry double major. She, and her twin sister, were the first in their family to attend college. Murphy joined the laboratory of T. B. Rauchfuss in 1983 as an undergraduate researcher, working on organometallic cluster reaction mechanisms until she graduated with two B.S. degrees (one in chemistry and one in biochemistry) in 1986. She coauthored two publications as an undergraduate. This early research experience was key to her realization that to be a “real” chemist, one needed a Ph.D. She therefore went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison for her Ph.D., working with A. B. Ellis on the surface chemistry of single-crystalline II-VI semiconductors. Upon her graduation from Madison in 1990, she went to the California Institute of Technology as an NSF postdoctoral fellow, pioneering studies of electron transfer through DNA with J. K. Barton. Her research career, at that point, then encompassed all three major subdivisions of inorganic chemistry at the time (organometallics, solid-state, bioinorganic). In 1993 Murphy joined the faculty of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of South Carolina (USC); she was the first woman hired on the tenure track in that department. Her research program, even at that early time, was focused on the interaction of biomolecules with the small curved surfaces of colloidal nanoparticles. She began studies of the binding of intrinsically-curved (by virtue of their sequence) DNA oligonucleotides with what were later termed unpassivated quantum dots, using photoluminescence of the dots to construct binding isotherms. In this early work, she and her group did indeed learn that intrinsically curved DNA did bind more tightly to curved surfaces. In the 1993-2000 period, Murphy won many young investigator awards for her research and educational efforts (NSF CAREER Award, 1995; Cottrell Scholar of the Research Corporation, 1996; Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, 1997; Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, 1998). Her lab also synthesized coordination compounds as optical sensors of local environments, and she collaborated with others, notably M. A. Berg and R. S. Coleman at USC, to develop organic fluorescent probes of DNA dynamics and measure such dynamics on the picosecond time scale. Starting in 1999/2000, Murphy turned her attention to colloidal metal nanoparticles; she was initially motivated by the versatility of noble metal nanoparticles as sensors (via plasmon band shifting and surface-enhanced Raman scattering) compared to the photoluminescence from quantum dots. She therefore embarked on a series of studies to create metal nanocrystals of controlled size and shape that would be stable under aqueous conditions. From 2000-2009 her laboratory at USC published dozens of papers about the seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanocrystals, especially nanorods of controllable aspect ratio; their surface chemistry, their interaction with biomolecules, cells, and organisms. Her lab was one of the first to perform systematic studies on the cytotoxicity of colloidal engineered nanomaterials and its mitigation (via surface chemistry). In 2009 she moved back to UIUC as a faculty member, and her research portfolio expanded to include proteomic analysis of protein display on nanocrystals, NMR analysis of ligand dynamics on nanocrystals, and large-scale collaborations on sustainable nanotechnology and materials chemistry. She and her research group have published over 270 papers that have collectively been cited over 41,000 times. Murphy and her laboratory’s work has been honored with a number of awards: the 2011 Inorganic Nanoscience Award from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry; the 2013 Carol Tyler Award from the International Precious Metals Institute; the 2015 Transformational Research and Excellence in Education (TREE) Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement; the 2019 Remsen Award from the ACS Maryland Section; the 2019 Linus Pauling Medal from the ACS Pacific Northwest Sections; the 2019 Materials Research Society Medal; and the 2020 ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry. She was a 2015 Langmuir Lecturer, sponsored by the ACS Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry, and has been named a Fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Chemical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Murphy was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2015 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
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