Sara Skrabalak Named as a Recipient of a 2026 Research Corporation for Science Advancement STAR Award

Congratulations to Professor Sara Skrabalak, recipient of the 2026 Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) STAR (Science Teaching and Research) Award. This award "recognizes outstanding research and educational accomplishments" and includes a $5,000 cash prize. The award will be presented, and Prof. Skrabalak will give a talk during the 2026 Cottrell Scholar Conference in July, 2026, in Tucson, Arizona. Please follow this link for further details of this award.

Stated within the RCSA award announcement, "STAR awardee Sara Skrabalak is an outstanding scientist and scientific leader whose boundary-pushing research spans multiple material classes, including metals, mixed-metal oxides, and heteroanionic materials, and addresses applications in catalysis, solar energy conversion, chemical sensing, and secure electronics. Her commitment to mentorship has fostered a thriving research group, attracting students who are drawn not only to the excellence of the research but also to the group’s culture. In leadership roles at her institution and beyond, she has scaled effective mentoring practices and helped equip other faculty with the tools to become effective teachers and mentors. She is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief of Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Letters and was recently awarded a National Science Foundation CCI Phase 2 Award for the Center for Single-Entity Nanochemistry and Nanocrystal Design."

Sara Skrabalak received her B.A. in chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 where she conducted research with Professor William E. Buhro. She then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she completed her Ph.D. in chemistry in fall of 2006 under the tutelage of Professor Kenneth S. Suslick. After conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Washington – Seattle with Professors Younan Xia and Xingde Li, she began on the faculty at Indiana University – Bloomington in 2008. She is currently a James H. Rudy Professor at Indiana University. She was appointed Editor-in-Chief for the ACS journals Chemistry of Materials and ACS Materials Letters ​in 2020.

She is a recipient of both NSF CAREER and DOE Early Career Awards. She is a 2012 Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar, a 2013 Sloan Research Fellow, a 2014 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar and 2017 Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellows. In 2014, she received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry and in 2017 was the recipient of the Frontiers in Research Excellence & Discovery Award from Research Corporation. She served as an Associate Editor for the RSC journals Nanoscale from 2017-2020 and Nanoscale Horizons from 2018-2020. Her group is developing new synthetic methods to solid materials with defined shapes and architecture then studying the properties of the materials as they are applied to applications in energy science, chemical sensing, and secured electronics.