Renee Frontiera promoted to Associate Professor
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (05/13/2019)—The University of Minnesota Board of Regents approved, Thursday, May 9, the promotion of Renee Frontiera from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure. The promotion is effective, Monday, July 1, 2019.
Renee Frontiera has been a professor in the Department of Chemistry since 2013, and holds a graduate appointment in chemical physics. Frontiera combines ultrafast spectroscopy, protein biophysics, and plasmonic materials, developing a research program that addresses questions at the interface of chemistry, biology, and materials science. Her research group is investigating a variety of problems related to the effect of nanoscale local environments on chemistry determining how heterogeneous local environments affect chemical reaction dynamics. One project entails the development and application of a novel, all-optical nanoscale Raman imaging technique that combines femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy with concepts from fluorescence-based, super-resolution imaging. A second area of active research is investigating the mechanism of plasmonic enhancement in photovoltaic and photocatalytic devices.
Professor Frontiera is committed to teaching, mentoring and advising. She is the adviser to 14 graduate students, and has mentored a total of 6 post-doctoral researchers. She also involves undergraduate students in her research, and to date she has advised 4 current and 7 previous students.
She is actively engaged in a number of community outreach activities, including being one of the performers in the Department of Chemistry's "Energy and U" show, which introduces more than 10,000 elementary students a year to science, college classrooms, and the first law of thermodynamics. She participates in outreach at a local community center, volunteers as a mentor for the Chemistry Women Membership Network, has helped to organize a departmental graduate student research symposium, and has served as an undergraduate adviser to chemistry majors.
Frontiera 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 in 2013, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Northwestern University.
She 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.”