Ray Schaak, a Penn State DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry with roots in Lebanon County, earned the 2025 F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.
He said he was in his 10th-grade chemistry class at Palmyra Area Senior High School when he first decided to pursue the subject.
“I remember talking to my parents the summer before 10th grade and just saying, ‘Chemistry — that’s so intimidating. I don’t know if I’m going to like it,’” he said. “The first day of class, it was like, ‘Oh, this is a lot of math,’ and it kind of clicked with me.”
Schaak graduated from Palmyra in 1994 and Lebanon Valley College in 1998. He earned his Ph.D. at Penn State in 2001.
His research focuses on nanoscale materials, which are thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. Along with his team of graduate students, he said he develops “chemical recipes.”
“In a nutshell, I make stuff,” Schaak said. “You can think about it as being chefs, but instead of in the kitchen, in the chemistry lab.”
He said materials drive technology. When new materials are made or new uses are found, technology can improve to utilize them.
And Schaak’s research suggests a significantly better result than most chemists would assert.
“We have this paper that claims we can make up to 65,000 different varieties of a certain kind of materials,” he said. “And most research in my field would make one or two.”
The award recipient is chosen through a nomination and selection process. Someone from outside of the candidate’s institution nominates them and letters of support from other chemists are included in a nomination package.
Schaak said from there, a national-level committee composed of experts in various fields chooses a winner from the candidates.
The nominations were due Nov. 1, and Schaak said he didn’t receive any word until the middle of August.
“I got a call from the president of the American Chemical Society — it doesn’t happen every day,” he said. “It’s a huge honor.”
Making the honor especially “cool” to Schaak is that he worked with F. Albert Cotton, who the award is named after.
“He was a chemist at Texas A&M University, and I actually started my career as a professor at Texas A&M while he was still on the faculty there, so I knew him,” Schaak said. “There’s connections to the place where I started my career.”
Schaak has won multiple honors and awards throughout his career, including the NSF CAREER Award, the National Fresenius Award and the ACS Inorganic Nanoscience Award, according to his Penn State Department of Chemistry page.
He said he has “plenty of stuff ahead” in his research, especially with recent pushes in energy technology and finding new materials.
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