The American Association for the Advancement of Science announced that Assistant Professor Alexandra Velian is one of four recipients of the 2023 Marion Milligan Mason Award.
The Marion Milligan Mason Awards are designed to kickstart the research career of promising future women senior investigators in the chemical sciences. This recognition is made possible through a bequest to AAAS by chemist and long-time AAAS member, Marion Tuttle Milligan Mason, who sought to support the advancement of women in the chemical sciences and to honor her family's commitment to higher education for women.
As an awardee, Velian will receive a $55,000 grant and participate in leadership development and mentoring opportunities.
Velian’s research group is pursuing the total synthesis of atomically-precise inorganic nanomaterials for catalytic, electronic and quantum information applications. In 2020, Velian received the NSF CAREER award to fund work on elucidating and harnessing metal-support interactions in single atom catalysts using designer nanoclusters as functional models.
As an undergraduate research at Caltech, Velian was the first member of Professor Theodor Agapie’s group where she developed the synthesis of low-valent mono- and bimetallic complexes supported by a terphenyl diphosphine framework. Velian then received her Ph.D. under the direction of Professor Christopher C. Cummins at MIT, where she developed the synthesis of anthracene and niobium-supported precursors to reactive phosphorus fragments and studied their behavior using chemical, spectroscopic, and computational methods. For her work, she was awarded the Alan Davison Prize for the Best Thesis in Inorganic Chemistry at MIT, and the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry Young Investigator Award. Following her Ph.D., Velian was a Materials Research Science & Engineering Center postdoctoral fellow with Professor Colin Nuckolls at Columbia University, where she worked on creating well-defined functional nanostructures by linking atomically precise metal chalcogenide clusters. Velian joined the University of Washington faculty in 2017.
Congratulations, Professor Velian!
To learn more about Professor Velian and her research, please visit her faculty page and research group website.