Lisa Fredin, an assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded a prestigious 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The two-year, $75,000 fellowships honor exceptional U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders. The awards honor scholars in seven fields: chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics
“The Sloan Fellowship is given to the most promising early career scholars in science and the award is clear recognition of the impact and importance of Lisa’s work,” said Robert Flowers, Herbert J. and Ann L. Siegel Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Since joining Lehigh, Lisa has been a creative scholar, a highly engaged member of the faculty, and an exceptional mentor to our students. We are fortunate to have her as a member of our faculty.”
Fredin is among 126 early career researchers chosen this year from 53 institutions. She is a quantum chemist whose research explores the chemistry of surfaces, nanostructures, and disordered systems to better understand the fundamental properties of emerging materials. Fredin builds models of complex materials, which are a mixture of local chemical effects and extended material electronic structures. These computations are at the edge of the current computing power and address important problems in solar energy, molecular switching and sensing, as well as pushing computational science. Fredin’s team develops models at the interface of experiment and theory to predict the fundamental electronic properties of materials as they are actually measured by experiments.
Fredin earned her B.S. in chemistry, biochemistry and applied mathematics with a minor in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed a joint computational-experimental Ph.D. at Northwestern University synthesizing molecules, measuring material properties and modeling devices of hybrid organic-inorganic dielectrics.
After a postdoctoral associateship at Lund University in Sweden, where she modeled the photochemistry of transition-metal complexes for light-harvesting, Fredin worked as a National Research Council research associate developing new computational tools that reduce the cost of screening at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Since starting at Lehigh in 2018, her group has published 20 journal articles building a portfolio that address global energy and climate change problems. Fredin’s current portfolio is broad and can be combined to tackle some of the hardest computational problems of the 20th century.
The Sloan Research Fellowship is one of the most highly regarded awards available to young researchers, in part because so many past Fellows have gone on to become distinguished figures in science, including 57 Fellows who have received a Nobel Prize, to date.
"Sloan Research Fellowships are extraordinarily competitive awards involving the nominations of the most inventive and impactful early-career scientists across the U.S. and Canada,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how Fellows take leading roles shaping the research agenda within their respective fields.”
The Sloan Foundation’s mission is “to make the world a better place by advancing the frontiers of knowledge.” Founded in 1934 by industrialist and long-time CEO of General Motors Alfred P. Sloan Jr., the Foundation awards approximately 200 grants per year (excluding the Sloan Research Fellowships) totaling about $80 million in support of research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economics.
