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Grants and Awards News

Fang Liu receives DOE Early Career Award

Assistant Professor Fang Liu has received funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Program (ECRP).

The ECRP bolsters the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work. Since its inception in 2010, the program has made 961 awards, with 631 awards to university researchers and 330 awards to national laboratory researchers. Inthe 2024 competition, 91 early career scientists from across the country received a combined $138 million in funding for research covering a wide range of topics. ECRP awardees in this round of funding were required to be an untenured Assistant or Associated Professor on the tenure track at a U.S. academic institution or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility who received their Ph.D. within the past 12 years.

The award to the Liu Group of $875,000 over five years will support a project titled “Reveal the Structure-Dynamics Relationship in Solution-Phase Photoredox Catalysis with Explainable Machine Learning.” Bimolecular photoinduced electron transfer in the solution phase is fundamental for many energy science applications, such as photoredox catalysis. Understanding how the chemical structures of electron donors and acceptors impact the photoinduced electron transfer dynamics is crucial for improving photoredox catalysis efficiency. This project aims to reveal the structure-dynamics relationship in photoredox catalysis by developing an automated data pipeline for related simulations and extracting catalyst design rules with explainable machine learning.

Congratulations, Fang!