Kelsie E. Wentz is a native of West Virginia and received her B.S. in Chemistry from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 2017. Following her undergraduate studies, she moved to the University of Virginia to pursue her Ph.D. working under the guidance of Professor Robert J. Gilliard Jr. (now at MIT). During her doctoral studies, she developed the synthetic strategies to prepare highly reactive borafluorene monoanions, and established their utility as a novel chemical synthon by various transformations with other small molecules. After finishing her Ph.D. (2022), Kelsie joined Professor Rebekka S. Klausen’s lab at Johns Hopkins University as a MOSAIC Postdoctoral Fellow and Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow to investigate the fundamental electronic and mechanical properties that are accessible with functional Si-Si bonds incorporated into the main-chain and crosslinks of polymers. In recognition of her work, Kelsie has been honored by the ACS with the 2023 DIC Young Investigator Award and the 2024 PMSE Future Faculty Award.
Research in the Wentz lab at IU will interface synthetic chemistry with materials science, while providing synthetic strategies to access new generations of main-group molecular building blocks and macromolecular electronic polymeric materials. Students working in the Wentz lab will gain expertise in inorganic, organometallic, and polymer chemistry while becoming proficient at critical thinking. More importantly, they will be encouraged to develop original ideas and creative solutions to current materials chemistry challenges faced by our society.