WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 26, 2018 – The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2019 Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences. First awarded in 2015 and funded by the Marion Milligan Mason Fund, the Award is designed to kickstart the research efforts of early-career women researchers in the chemical sciences. The 2019 awardees have made extraordinary contributions through their research programs and demonstrate a commitment to move their fields forward.
The award was made possible by a $2.2 million bequest to AAAS by chemist and long-time AAAS member, Marion Tuttle Milligan Mason, who sought to support the advancement of women in the chemical sciences and to honor her family's commitment to higher education for women. The Marion Milligan Mason Fund provides grants of $50,000 every other year to women researchers engaged in basic research in the chemical sciences. In addition to research funding, the program provides leadership development and mentoring opportunities. Applications for the 2021 Awards will open in Fall 2019. For more information regarding the award, please see https://www.aaas.org/programs/marion-milligan-mason-award.
2019 Marion Milligan Mason Awardees
Vivian Ferry, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Her research focuses on light-matter interactions in nanoscale materials, and her specific research interests include light management in solar energy conversion, switchable metamaterials, and nanoscale chirality.
Susan Fullerton, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Through her research, she seeks to establish a fundamental understanding of ion-electron transport at the molecular level and use this knowledge to design next-generation electronic devices at the limit of scaling for memory, logic, and energy storage.
Lilian Hsiao, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. Dr. Hsiao’s research interests are in the areas of soft materials and complex fluids – specifically on the use of shaped colloids and functionalized polymer surfaces. She specializes in using microscopy and rheology to identify the frameworks used to engineer the mechanical properties of soft surfaces.
Heather Kulik, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her group harnesses first-principles electronic structure in transition-metal chemistry and large-scale enzymology to understand fundamental phenomena in chemical bonding for catalyst and materials design. Her broader research goals span automated molecular design and discovery, large-scale quantum phenomena in enzymes and the condensed phase, and electronic structure for transition metal chemistry and catalysis.
Corinna Schindler, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on innovations in modern synthetic organic and organometallic chemistry to address fundamentally interesting questions of biological importance. Her primary aim is to develop new synthetic methodologies to enable the synthesis and evaluation of biologically active target structures, often derived and inspired by natural products.
About AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For additional information about AAAS, see www.aaas.org.