Chemistry Student Pranav Viswanathan Receives 2024 GEOSET Award

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Pranav Viswanathan, a senior undergraduate student in chemistry, has been named the recipient of the 2024 Sir Harold W. Kroto and Steve F.A. Acquah Global Educational Outreach for Science Engineering and Technology (GEOSET) Award. Each year, the award is bestowed upon a student in the College of Natural Sciences who has demonstrated excellence in science communication through digital media.

On May 3 at the annual Chemistry Senior and Awards Dinner, Viswanathan received the GEOSET plaque and a $200 prize for his video project about the unknown force that holds molecules together. Viswanathan also presented his work on polyzwitterions and the possibility of unlocking the properties of new materials, highlighting a method to encapsulate molecules for potential applications in drug delivery. 

The award, a testament to the enduring legacy of the late Nobel Laureate Sir Harold Kroto, was established by Steve Acquah, the Digital Media Lab Coordinator at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, and an associate research professor of chemistry, to perpetuate the spirit of research and outreach championed by Kroto.

“I love teaching, and I love research, but I also love talking about science and eventually want to be a professor,” Viswanathan said. “I would like to do my own research and would love to teach students. I want to be a science storyteller. One of the things that I learned from my advisor, Professor Murugappan Muthukumar, is that when you're talking about science, the goal should be to tell a story of what was done, and it's a skill that's very difficult, but it's one that I want to keep refining as a scientist.”

“Congratulations to Pranav on his award,” says Acquah. “His passion for science communication is clear in the video he produced. Harold Kroto would have been very pleased with the video.”

Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for their discovery of fullerenes, an allotrope of carbon. Kroto died in 2016, but left a legacy of research and outreach.

 “The Global Educational Outreach for Science Engineering and Technology initiative was created to provide a library of educational resources during my time at Florida State University,” Acquah adds. “I served as director of GEOSET Studios, a digital media lab in the Dirac Science Library and captured the research activities students and faculty. At UMass Amherst, along with the GEOSET Award, I am working on creating an open-access GEOSET Journal with Divya Dubey, a graduate student in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Ph.D. program. We want to give students at UMass more ways to communicate their scientific research while learning about the publishing process.”