Connie Lu promoted to professor

Connie Lu has been promoted to full professor, effective fall 2020. She started with the Department of Chemistry in 2009 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2015. She earned her doctorate at the California Institute of Technology and her Bachelor of Science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry.

Lu’s research is at the interface of inorganic and organometallic chemistry, energy and catalysis, and environmental and green chemistry. Her research methods encompass synthesis, spectroscopy, and theory. Researchers in her group are interested in creating, understanding, and exploiting new chemical bonding involving a transition metal center. Current research initiatives include configuring new bonds between first-row transition metals; deliver-to-order bimetallic active sites in metal-organic frameworks; and innovating bimetallic active sites for small-molecule activation.

One project her research group is working on involves developing homogeneous catalysts for converting abundant small molecules such as N2 and CO2 into useful chemical feedstocks. A big challenge in developing such catalysts is promoting multi-electron and proton-coupled reactivity. The researchers’ general approach is to create and test ligand designs that abet transition metals in transferring the electron and/or proton equivalents needed in small-molecule reduction. The ligands are ideally designed to quickly build a large family of potential transition-metal catalysts that can be screened for catalytic activity in a rapid and efficient manner. 

Professor Lu is an author on 60+ refereed journal articles and two book chapters and has conducted 100+ invited seminars. She is a member of the American Chemical Society and the Royal Chemical Society and has served as a mentor to future scientists at the national and local level, including advising four post-doctoral researchers, 18 graduate students, and 5 master’s students. She also teaches a number of courses such general chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and bioinorganic chemistry.

She is a co-principal investigator for the Inorganometallic Catalyst Design Center and is a member of the Center for BioInorganic Chemistry and Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.

Her honors and awards include being named an outstanding reviewer for Chemical Society Reviews for two consecutive years; being featured in an American Chemical Society virtual issue as a Journal of the American Chemical Society Young Investigator and another issue as one of the top young synthetic inorganic chemists; giving plenary lectures at the Royal Society of Chemistry Dalton Conference and the Advance Photo Source User meeting; chosen as the  Inorganic Chemistry Young Outstanding Upcoming Speaker for the Symposium on Advanced Biological Inorganic Chemistry in Kolkata and for the Gerhard and Lisolette Closs Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago. Lu is also the recipient of a Kavli Fellow, National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment Early Career Award.

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