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Steven Tait Receives Outstanding Junior Faculty Award


March 6, 2014

Assistant Professor Steven Tait has been selected to receive a 2014 Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award sponsored by the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs as well as the Vice Provost for Research. The awards are designed to assist untenured, tenure-track faculty to enhance their research programs prior to tenure. Awards are given to junior faculty who show promise of achieving great distinction as scholars or artists.

Tait began his appointment in the Department of Chemistry at IU Bloomington in 2008 and received an adjunct appointment in the Department of Physics in 2012. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington and was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. His interdisciplinary research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, focuses on the self-assembly of molecular building blocks at surfaces to develop greater energy efficiency in hydrocarbon catalysts and in functional organic thin films.

His research proposal addresses the development of highly ordered films of oriented organic layers that can achieve excellent electronic performance. The Tait research group and its collaborators have developed a set of molecules capable of optimal self-assembly. The research program will test the limits of these new film growth strategies and the gains they can achieve for next-generation electronic devices.