Jillian Dempsey, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has received a 2015 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, awarded to highly creative researchers early in in their careers. The award from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation is for $875,000 over five years.
UNC-Chapel Hill has had six Packard Fellows in the past. The 2015 announcement marks the fourth year in a row that a UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member has won the prestigious award, affirming Carolina’s commitment to attract the brightest and most innovative young scientists and engineers.
“Since arriving in Chapel Hill in 2012, Jillian Dempsey has tackled the looming energy problem with intelligence and intensity,” said Joe Templeton, Venable Professor and interim chair of the department of chemistry. “Her investigations of synchronous and asynchronous proton and electron movements are leading the way to new sunlight-to-energy conversion opportunities.”
Dempsey and her lab are searching for ways to efficiently capture sunlight in artificial systems and carry out fuel-producing reactions to store the sun’s energy in the high-energy chemical bonds of molecules like hydrogen. Her work is contributing to a growing need to develop renewable, environmentally friendly energy sources.
Dempsey, an assistant professor of chemistry in UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences, serves as a science advisory board member for the National Science Foundation’s Center for Chemical Innovation in Solar Fuels and is on the executive committee of UNC’s Energy Frontier Research Center in Solar Fuels. She is a recipient of NSF’s CAREER Award, one of the foundation’s most prestigious awards given in support of junior faculty.
The Packard Fellowships program invests in future leaders who have the freedom to take risks, explore new frontiers in their fields of study and follow uncharted paths that can lead to groundbreaking discoveries. It is among the nation’s largest nongovernmental fellowships.
Recipients have gone on to receive awards such as the Nobel Prize in Physics, MacArthur Fellowships and elections to the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering.
The foundation calls Packard Fellows “inquisitive, passionate scientists and engineers who take a creative approach to their research, dare to think big and follow new ideas wherever they lead.”
Read more about previous UNC winners.
