Discover magazine names Colvin a rising star

Discover magazine names Colvin a rising star

Vicki Colvin,
assistant professor of chemistry, is featured in the October
issue of Discover magazine as one of the “Top 20 Scientists
to Watch.”

In the company
of MacArthur fellows and other award-winning scientists,
Colvin explains how she found inspiration in old coffee
and the chemists’ quest to become true architects.

Surveying more
than 1,000 researchers, Discover sought out the top 20 scientists
under the age of 40 to keep an eye on in the next 20 years.
In particular, they were looking for those who have “demonstrated
once-in-a-generation insight.”

Colvin, a physical
chemist, studies the structures and properties of nanoscale
materials, particularly those with highly patterned structures,
in hope of finding building blocks for new materials that
may lead to advanced telecommunications and data-storage
systems.

Colvin is an
Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, a Beckman Young Investigator, a
National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development
(CAREER) awardee and a recipient of a Research Innovation
Award from Research Corp. for her work in nanostructures.
Among other awards, she has received the American Chemical
Society’s Victor K. LaMer Prize and Rice’s Camille
and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award and Phi Beta Kappa Teaching
Prize.

“This is
probably one of the best awards I could get because of the
company I was with, and it’s also nice because my grandma
can go buy it,” Colvin said of the Discover magazine
honor.

The issue of
Discover is on newstands now. The magazine also can be accessed
online at <www.discover.com>.