Xiaoji Xu Recognized as Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Selected by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation as one of the 2021 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award recipients, Dr. Xiaoji Xu is one of only 16 individuals chosen to receive this prestigious and highly competitive award. Xu's research focus on "Development of the Next Generation of Multimodal Chemical, Optical, and Electrical Scanning Probe Microscopy" will be supported with an unrestricted research grant of $100,000. The award winners are selected from faculty who are within the first five years of their academic careers, have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education. According to the Foundation's website, their purpose is to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances throughout the world. The Xu Lab research focus is to develop methods and instruments for spectroscopic study of nanostructured polymers and energy-related material measurement and imaging at the nanoscale with < 10 nm spatial resolution. As described in the Lehigh News, "They employ two infrared nanoscale imaging methods invented by Xu: peak force scattering-type near-field optical microscopy (PF-SNOM) and peak force infrared (PFIR) microscopy. . . His group also recently invented the pulsed force Kelvin probe force microscopy, a new type of imaging tool that allows for ~10 nm spatial resolution for measurement of surface potential under ambient conditions." (Read more) In addition to probing new frontiers in microscopy, Xu also designed a research-related simulation for his students to enhance their remote learning during the virtual instruction days of the COVID-19 transition-- further reinforcing the unique learning opportunities that arise from an outstanding, dedicated, and creative researcher- educator. On September 15, 2021, Lehigh University announced its prestigious Lehigh University Awards--among which was the 2021 Libsch Research Award honoree: Wonpil Im. Dr. Im has joint appointments in Biological Sciences, Bioengineering, and Chemistry at Lehigh University. He obtained his Bachelor's and Master's in chemistry from Hanyang University (Seoul, Korea). In 1997, he started his Ph.D. studies in chemistry at the University of Montreal under the guidance of professor Benoît Roux and followed him to the Weill Medical College of Cornell University where he received his Ph.D. in 2002. After a post-doctoral appointment at the Scripps Research Institute, he joined the faculty of the University of Kansas in the Center for Computational Biology in 2005, working on membrane (protein) simulations, publishing extensively, and receiving numerous scholarly recognitions. In 2016, he joined Lehigh University where he has been named the Presidential Endowed Chair in Health - Science and Engineering and received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from Humboldt foundation (2017) as well as the CAS Dean's Research Award (2019) His research interests include protein/peptide interactions with/in biological membranes; transmembrane-induced signaling and regulation; NMR structure calculation & refinement; modeling and simulation of glycoconjugates; bacterial outer membranes and interactions with proteins; and proteinligand and protein-protein interactions (Read more) When asked his thoughts on receiving this honor, Im stated that he was humbly thrilled and honored to hear that he had received this prestigious award. He feels thankful to the selection committee for favorably considering his research activities thus far--and fortunate for the opportunities he has received at Lehigh which have allowed him to continue to build on his almost 20 years of research. He is also thankful to have great undergraduates, graduates, and postdocs in his lab. since their creative, hard work has made so many research accomplishments possible. Page 6 · Lehigh University
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==