Renee Frontiera named Finalist for the 2022 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/13/2022)—Professor Renee Frontiera has been named a Finalist for the 2022 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, the world’s largest unrestricted prize honoring early-career scientists and engineers.
The 31 honorees were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 309 nominees from 150 leading universities and scientific institutions from 38 states across the United States. Three winners—in life sciences, chemistry, and physical sciences & engineering—will be named on June 29, each receiving $250,000 as a Blavatnik National Awards Laureate.
Frontiera’s research was highlighted in a June 1 press release announcing the finalists:
“Physical chemist Renee Frontiera, Ph.D., is pushing scientists’ ability to track molecules and chemical reactions to the ultimate limits of space and time. Raman spectroscopy has long been a bread-and-butter technique in chemistry to characterize molecules, but Frontiera has shattered its technical limitations by making it possible to track the ultrafast motion and reaction of molecules on the scale of femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second. These powerful techniques have already empowered Frontiera and other scientists to answer fundamental chemical questions in fields as diverse as biology, energy, and the environment.”
Frontiera has been a professor in the Department of Chemistry since 2013 and holds a graduate appointment in chemical physics. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in chemistry and Chinese from the Carleton College, and her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the chemistry faculty at the University of Minnesota, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University.
Frontiera has been recognized with a number of awards, including being named a 2019 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Journal of Physical Chemistry C 2018 lectureship, a competitive university McKnight Land-Grant Professorship, and was listed by Chemical and Engineering News as one of the "Talented 12," which recognizes "path-paving scientists.”