Landes wins ACS Early Career award

Christy Landes, an associate professor of chemistry and of electrical and computer engineering, has won the 2016 Early Career Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The four physical chemistry division awards announced in January honor senior and early career scientists for achievements in theoretical and experimental physical chemistry. The recipients will be honored at an awards symposium in Philadelphia during the fall national meeting of the ACS, which bills itself as the largest scientific society in the word.

The society cited Landes “for integrating super-resolution single-molecule techniques and information theory to contribute new discoveries in biological and chemical separations at the molecular scale.”

Landes and her students develop and employ advanced microscopy to study nature’s design principles. Their goal is to understand how single biological molecules like proteins function and find ways to mimic relationships between structures and functions with synthetic materials. She won a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2011.

Landes joined Rice in 2009. Among her projects in recent years, she has published research on a signal processing technique to understand the roots of memory, learning and neurological disease; how blood serum proteins interact with nanoparticles; advanced microscopy and math to pinpoint specific DNA sequences; a method to improve the isolation of proteins for pharmaceuticals; a method to build “drawbridges” between light-scattering metal nanoparticles for advanced color displays; and how to image porous materials below the diffraction limit of light.