BYLINE: Jared Sagoff
Mercouri Kanatzidis, a materials scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and professor at Northwestern University, will receive the 2025 ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials from the American Chemical Society, the nation’s leading professional organization of chemists.
The award “recognizes and encourages creative work in the chemistry of materials,” according to the citation.
At Argonne, Kanatzidis’s work has focused on the implications of a type of sulfur-containing material called a chalcogenide for new potential superconductors, as well as X-ray and gamma-ray detectors.
In 2023, the International Mineralogical Society named a new chalcogenide mineral, kanatzidisite, after Kanatzidis. “To have a mineral named after me? Well, that’s a real ‘rock star’ moment in my career,” Kanatzidis said. “It’s a very unusual honor, and you hope the name will stick around a long time.”
The award also recognized Kanatzidis’s work in the discovery of halide perovskite materials, a kind of novel semiconducting material that has been a useful candidate for solar cell materials for the past 10 or 15 years. “The perovskites have seen tremendous record-breaking increases in their efficiencies since we first described them a decade or two ago, and they also have the advantage of being more flexible than silicon,” he said.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
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