JHU's McQueen receives solid-state chemistry fellowship

Tyrel M. McQueen, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins, has been awarded the ExxonMobil Award Faculty Fellowship in Solid State Chemistry.

Image caption: Tyrel McQueen

Image credit: Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University

The fellowship recognizes young untenured scientists in tenure-track faculty positions at U.S. institutions who have made substantial contributions to the discipline of solid-state chemistry and have the potential to emerge as leaders in the field. The fellowship also recognizes solid-state chemistry as a critical science and engineering discipline that is a vital component of the research enterprise in the United States.

The award includes an unrestricted grant of $10,000 in research funds and will be presented to McQueen at the 2013 American Chemical Society national meeting in Indianapolis in September. The award was first given in 1979; McQueen is the first recipient from Johns Hopkins.

McQueen's research goal is to achieve true "materials by design" through the discovery and control of exotic electronic states in the solid state. His laboratory develops new synthetic methodologies to prepare meta-stable, non-thermodynamic compounds with basic science and energy applications. Particular emphasis is placed on experimentally determining how the dynamics of simple, local electronic interactions give rise to spectacular and unexplained emergent physical phenomena, such as superconductivity—useful everywhere from MRIs to cell towers—and macroscopic quantum entanglement, which could possibly be useful for quantum computing.