Dr. Raymond Schaak is the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at Penn State University. Dr. Schaak also has a Courtesy appointment in the Chemical Engineering Department at Penn State and is part of the Penn State Materials Research Institute. Dr. Schaak received a B.S. degree in chemistry from Lebanon Valley College in 1998. In 2001, he received a Ph.D. in materials chemistry from Penn State Universityunder the direction of Professor Thomas Mallouk, where he demonstrated the concept of solid-state retrosynthesis for the stepwise and predictable topotactic synthesis of bulk and nanostructured perovskite oxide materials. From 2001–2003, he was a postdoctoral research associate with Professor Robert Cava at Princeton University, where he worked on the synthesis and physical property characterization of metal carbide, boride, phosphide, oxide, and alloy superconductors. In 2003, Dr. Schaak began his independent career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University. In 2007, he moved to Penn State University as an Associate Professor of Chemistry and was promoted to Professor in 2011. Dr. Schaak was appointed as the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry in 2013. His research group focuses on developing new chemical strategies for the synthesis of nanoscale solid-state materials and applying these materials to problems at the forefront of modern materials research. Dr. Schaak has received several prestigious awards, including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (1999), an NSF CAREER Award (2006), a Beckman Young Investigator Award (2006), a DuPont Young Professor Grant (2006), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2007), a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2007), a Research Corporation Scialog Award for Solar Energy Conversion (2010), the National Fresenius Award (2011), the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences (2012), the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award (2016), and the ACS Akron Section Award (2020). In 2017, Dr. Schaak was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and in 2022, Dr. Schaak received the Lebanon Valley College Distinguished Alumnus Award, which is one of LVC’s highest honors. Dr. Schaak served as Awards Committee co-chair of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Inorganic Chemistry (ACS DIC) from 2007–2011 and as chair of the ACS DIC Nanoscience subdivision in 2013. Dr. Schaak also served on the Cottrell Scholar Selection Committee of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Solid State Chemistry, and is both an Associate Editor of ACS Nano (since 2010) and the inaugural Deputy Editor of ACS Nanoscience Au, which launched in 2021.
Research Description
The Schaak group’s main research interests are in the general area of synthetic inorganic nanochemistry. We identify target materials systems that underpin practical, relevant, and emerging applications, but for which a fundamentally interesting synthetic bottleneck precludes their formation. We then seek to develop new synthetic tools that overcome these challenges, both to generate and study our specific target materials and also to provide conceptually new synthetic approaches that are broadly applicable. Our targets, materials systems, and applications are diverse, spanning metals, metal alloys, metal oxides, metal chalcogenides, metal phosphides, metal carbides, and metal borides for use in catalysis, photonics, magnetic separations, and energy conversion and storage. Current research projects include (a) discovering and studing new non-noble-metal catalysts, comprised of inexpensive and Earth-abundant elements, for solar energy conversion and fuel cell applications, (b) developing a “total synthesis” toolkit for the construction of multi-functional hybrid inorganic nanostructures, and (c) synthesizing and studying the formation pathways of metal chalcogenide nanostructures with useful catalytic, magnetic, and optical properties.