The AAAS Marion Milligan Mason Award for Women in the Chemical Sciences recipient.
Luisa Whittaker-Brooks, is an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Utah focusing on solid-state chemistry and nanostructured thin film device fabrication. Her research group is driven by two of the greatest challenges of our time –energy beyond fossil fuels and low cost, environmentally-friendly electronics for daily use applications. Her work focuses on synthesizing well-defined and high-quality materials for applications in solar energy conversion, thermoelectrics, batteries, and electronics. Whittaker-Brooks has made significant contributions to the fields of materials chemistry and nanotechnology and has over 20 publications and 2 patents. Her research papers have been included in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Advanced Energy Materials, the Journal of Material Chemistry, and Organic Electronics. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Chemistry from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and her B.S. degree in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Panama. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and the 2013 L’Oréal Fellowship for Women in Science (FWIS) Award. She has grants from the Utah Energy Research Triangle (the University of Utah seed program), the Government of Panama, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Materials Research, Science, and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at the University of Utah. Her lab includes one postdoctoral fellow, six graduate students, four undergraduate students and three high-school students.