PROMOTIONS
On Sept. 1, 2023, Trisha Andrew, Min Chen, and Kevin Kittilstved were promoted to Full Professor; Ruthanne Paradise to Senior Lecturer II and Xueying (Sharon) Qin to Senior Lecturer.
Trisha Andrew
Prof. Andrew moved her lab to the Chemistry Department from the University of Wisconsin in 2016. She is the recipient of a number of awards, such as the David and Lucille Packard Foundation Award for Scientists & Engineers and the L’Oréal USA Fellowship For Women in Science, in addition to being named a Kavli Foundation Fellow and to the Forbes Magazine “30 Under 30” List of Innovators in Energy. With a unique background in Chemistry and Electrical Engineering, her research has always leveraged chemical insights to innovate solutions to big problems, including hidden-explosives detection, sub-diffraction optical lithography, solar energy harvesting, and, more recently, environmentally-benign textile manufacturing. Prof. Andrew directs the Wearable Electronics Lab, which developed polymer chemical vapor deposition processes to create ultrathin yet rugged functional coatings on textiles without using solvents or fluoroalkyl-containing ingredients. Prof. Andrew’s company, Soliyarn, recently opened an auxiliary textile finishing plant in Canton MA, on the grounds of a sixth-generation family-owned knitting facility, showcasing Prof. Andrew’s continuous-process chemical vapor deposition system. Meanwhile, at UMass, Prof. Andrew and her students focus on developing interesting vapor deposition chemistries and demonstrating new uses for their functional coatings. Some of her recent interests are in optical thermoregulation, where sunlight and light absorbing/reflecting coatings are used for energy-efficient space heating/cooling and personal temperature management, and in halide-ion batteries, where the movement of biocompatible chloride ions between two conductive polymer electrodes can be used to store and deliver charge to wearable devices.
Min Chen
Prof. Chen joined the department as a Lecturer in 2008 and began her independent career as an Assistant Professor in 2010. She was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2018. Her research group focuses on developing nanopore-based bio-analytical tools to address the challenges in disease diagnostics, drug discovery, genomics and proteomics. In a nanopore sensor, there are two compartments containing electrolyte solutions (typically K+ and Cl-). These compartments are separated by an impermeable membrane in which a single pore is embedded to allow ions to flow. Nanopore-based detection relies on the modulation of ionic current when an analyte interacts with the pore. The ion current signal vs time gives information on the analyte’s identity, conformational states, and concentration. In Prof. Chen’s work, the nanopores are pore-forming proteins that are naturally found in cell membranes. Prof. Chen’s lab has developed intensive experience in modifying these protein pores so that they can selectively bind proteins of interest for identification, or hold proteins in a form-fitting manner to reveal functional-related motions. Applications of her work include sensing disease biomarkers, tracking structural dynamics of viral proteases and kinases, screening novel drug candidates, and sequencing nucleic acids and proteins.
Kevin Kittilstved
Prof. Kittilstved joined the Chemistry department as an Assistant Professor in 2011. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2018. His group seeks to understand how charge carriers and impurities in inorganic materials modify their function, and to control these properties to create novel materials with desired semiconductor, magnetic and optical properties. This is accomplished by developing synthetic methods to add dopant atoms to the material, while controlling their charge state and coordination environment. His group does this at several length scales, from molecular clusters (<2 nanometer dia.), to colloidal nanocrystals (tens of nm), to bulk metal oxides (cm). These materials are characterized using several sophisticated and complementary techniques. A major research theme seeks to control the composition of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals from the bottom up. Doped clusters with well-defined composition and size have applications in solar energy conversion, fluorescent labeling for microscopy and spin-based electronics. A second research theme involves understanding the interaction between targeted chemical dopants and native defects in larger magnetic metal oxide nanocrystals and bulk semiconductors. These are very technologically important materials where the ability to control defects could greatly expand their applications in fields such as quantum information processing.
In August 2023, Professor Kevin Kittilstved accepted an offer to join the Department of Chemistry at Washington State University as a Professor. His wife Raina will be an Assistant Professor on the Career Track at WSU. Due to the timing of the decision, Kevin deferred his start date at WSU to Fall 2024. The move to WSU will take Kevin back to his roots in Eastern Washington, just 90 minutes away from where he grew up in Spokane. Raina will also be a short flight or five hour drive from family in Seattle. Kevin reflected on his time in the Department writing, “The decision to leave UMass Chemistry was not easy and was especially difficult due to the overwhelming support and many friendships that Raina and I have made with faculty, staff, and students over the past 13 years. UMass Chemistry will hold a special place in my heart and I will miss everyone.”
Ruthanne Paradise
Dr. Paradise earned her PhD from the UMass Chemistry department in 2009, joined the faculty as a Lecturer in 2011, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017. As the Director of Physical and Analytical Chemistry Laboratories, she primarily teaches the Physical, Quantitative Analysis, and Instrumental Analysis labs. As needed, she also teaches majors General Chemistry lab and lecture. Thus, she teaches all our majors, often in multiple courses. She practices (and has led workshops on) the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) approach to the labs, in which students actively guide their learning. She is working with Dr. Haoze He to develop Course Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) for our General Chemistry students. In addition to standard courses, she also supervises undergraduate researchers investigating the chemical properties of coffee in the context of black and white film development. She has served the department as the Chief Undergraduate Advisor for several years and was recognized for her excellent work by being named the Outstanding Advisor in the College of Natural Sciences in 2022.
Xueying (Sharon) Qin
Dr. Qin joined the Chemistry department as a Lecturer in 2017, after working as an Instructor at Kansas State University. She primarily teaches the non-majors sections of General Chemistry (Chem 111 and 112), as well the one-semester Organic Chemistry course (Chem 250). In these large sections, she emphasizes tailoring course content to meet students’ interests and needs, connecting the course material to their daily life, and providing structured learning. She is also the Chair of the Undergraduate Research and Awards Committee.
NEW FACULTY
Dr. Elliot Taffet joins the faculty at UMass Amherst after training as a computational chemist at Columbia University (BA 2014), Princeton University (PhD 2019), and Stanford University (PDRA 2021). Following an academic year of instructing the full-year sequence of large-lecture General Chemistry (Chem 111 and Chem 112), he won a departmental award for excellence in teaching. He balances teaching with undergraduate-centered research—coordinating a lab with more than a dozen undergraduates spread across three subgroups centered on methodology in quantum chemistry, biophysical simulations of molecular dynamics, and photosynthetic light-harvesting through the simulated interplay of chlorophyll and carotenoid pigments. His group presented three posters at the Molecular Biophysics in the Northeast (MBN) conference held at UMass Amherst, which enabled many of the undergraduate presenters to experience the fulfillment of contributing to a conference for the very first time.
Dr. Jiahui (Chris) Wu started at UMass as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2023. Chris received his B.Eng. in bioengineering from Guangdong University of Technology in China in 2009. He received his PhD in chemistry at the University of Alberta in Canada in 2014, working with Professor Robert E. Campbell to create a series of fluorescent protein-based biosensors for signaling molecules. After his PhD, Chris pursued his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Samie R. Jaffrey at Weill Cornell Medicine of Cornell University, where he invented a highly sensitive method for tracking RNA dynamics inside of living cells. At UMass, Chris’ research focuses on inventing cutting-edge technologies to decipher the functional roles of RNA and developing functional RNA molecules to target disease.
DEPARTURE - Knapp's New Position with NIH
Prof. Mike Knapp is departing UMass to start a permanent position at the NIH as a scientific review officer for the Molecular and Cellular Sciences and Technologies review branch at the NIH. This reflects his growing interest in combining leadership with science, and building or developing systems to support research more broadly. At MCST, he will work to set up review panels for commercial applications of measurement science and begin to learn how to improve scientific review.
Knapp started at UMass in 2002, bringing his family all the way from sunny California to enjoy the four seasons of Massachusetts. He had an enduring interest in expanding student opportunities in chemistry. His research combined inorganic and biochemistry areas, which focused on molecular sensing of either hypoxia (low O2) or explosives. Students from 4 of the 5 canonical divisions joined his lab over the years, with most students training in areas that combined mechanistic chemistry with some type of spectroscopy. Although he is closing his lab, his research was supported by grants from the NIH, Rays of Hope, and the ACS-PRF.
His teaching filled a valuable niche in undergraduate education, both in teaching and advising. He taught the Inorganic lab and lecture, and honors general chemistry, providing unique perspectives by bringing in topics such as the chemistry of the atmosphere, ceramics, and drinking water. He co-founded the peer-led team learning (PLTL) program at UMass, which created small group learning opportunities for first-year students and leadership opportunities for upper-level students. PLTL provided a concrete example of how a system can scale to have broad impacts on many students. With advising, Mike was either Chief Undergraduate Advisor or Undergraduate Program Director for eight years, including one year in which he held both roles.
Mike has an enduring interest in growing the tent to include more students in chemistry – in fact, he came to chemistry late, having majored in biochemistry and cell biology as an undergraduate. He engaged in national and local service with the ACS to increase capacity for student chemistry chapters and membership. In 2019, he wrote the grant which led to UMass joining the ACS Bridge program, which provided a new avenue for students to enter the grad program; this has led to multiple new graduate students entering. Mike also wrote the first draft of the charter for the UMass NOBCChE chapter, which was established in 2023.
Mike Knapp earned his PhD in inorganic chemistry from UC San Diego, specializing in magnetism and spectroscopy of polynuclear metal complexes. He carried out postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley, where he studied H-atom tunneling in enzymes. He then spent 22 years on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at UMass Amherst where his research interests were in O2-sensing enzymology and molecular sensing.