Shannon Boettcher ’03, Selected for DuPont Young Professors Program
Shannon Boettcher ‘03 UO assistant professor of chemistry, is among the eighteen early career scientists selected worldwide to the 2011 class of DuPont Young Professors.
Boettcher earned a bachelor's degree in 2003 from the Robert D. Clark Honors College and the UO, where he was a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. As a Clark Honors College student, he received the college's highest scholarship recognition -- the President's Award -- for his undergraduate thesis.
Boettcher earned a doctorate in 2008 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was an National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Before returning to the UO to join the faculty, he completed postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology.
“At the University of Oregon, one of the huge strengths we offer undergraduates is the opportunity to get involved in a lot of research, to take an active role in research,” says Boettcher of his undergraduate days at UO. “I think that was a great experience as an undergraduate.”
“The Clark Honors College is good for scientists,” he added. “It really stretches your mind. I really enjoyed Louise Bishop. I had a couple classes with her and she was really supportive of me in a variety of ways. Henry Alley did a fantastic job. He was the first person who took the time to actually point out grammar to me. In office hours he would really point that out to me, and that was actually really useful. He was a really good help for my writing style and quality.”
Boettcher, who joined the UO chemistry department in 2010, studies solar energy conversion. Specifically he is pursuing the development of materials that will not only convert sunlight into electricity but also store reserves of energy for later use. DuPont cited Boettcher for his research on “nanostructured oxides designed for solar water splitting.”
“There's a real practical impetus to do this,” says Boettcher. “Not only because solar energy is potentially clean but because if you could store that solar energy in a chemical bond like hydrogen, you have a way to use it when the sun's not shining.”
“I think it's extremely important that we have a strong technology base in renewable energy because the world literally may not have the resources it has now ever again. So I think it's really important to do as much as we can to try to have alternatives. No matter what the scenario turns out to be, we'll still have whatever technology we develop, we'll still know how to make solar panels a certain way or we'll know how to do these processes and that will be beneficial. That's what motivates me every day.”
Each of the selected DuPont Young Professors receives $75,000 in three annual grants of $25,000. The grants, totaling $1.3 million for the 2011 class, may be used to obtain matching funds through the National Science Foundation or other organizations. This year marks the 43rd year of the awards, which are sponsored by the DuPont Fellows Forum. To date, 548 young professors from the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and Africa have received some $48 million in grants.
The DuPont Young Professor program, which began in 1967, is designed to provide start-up assistance to promising young and untenured research faculty working in areas of interest to DuPont's long-term business. Work by this year's class focuses on solar energy, biomolecular sciences, polymer science, nanotechnology, entomology, chemistry, chemical engineering, statistics, animal biology and life sciences.