A special seminar presented by the Molecular Foundry IDEA committee.
Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Time: 11:00 am
Talk Title: Putting the ‘F’ in Chemistry: Improving Catalysis, Actinyl Control, and Diversity in STEM
Zoom link
Biography:
Polly is the Director of the Chemical Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a faculty professor in the Chemistry department at University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her degrees from Oxford and Sussex, and was a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at MIT before returning to the UK to a lectureship in 1999. Prior to returning to the US, her twenty-year academic career in the UK comprised a lectureship, then readership at the University of Nottingham, then a professorship at the University of Edinburgh where she held the Crum Brown Chair of chemistry.
Polly has received a variety of awards and prizes including the GDCH Todd Krebs Lectureship in 2019, RSC Wilkinson prize in 2018, the Lord Kelvin Medal 2017, which is the senior prize for the physical sciences awarded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin award in 2012. She made the film ‘A Chemical Imbalance’, a call to action for simple changes to achieve equality of opportunity in science, and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 2018 for her contributions to chemistry and women in STEM.
