Two scientists affiliated with CSD have been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to receive funding through the Early Career Research Program (ECRP): Jennifer Pore, from CSD’s Heavy Element Chemistry Group as well as the Heavy Element Group in the Nuclear Science Division, and Carolin Sutter-Fellass, a former CSD postdoc who now works in the Molecular Foundry.

The ECRP program, now in its 15th year, bolsters the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work. Awards to an institution of higher education will be approximately $875,000 over five years and the minimum request for awards to a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility are approximately $2,750,000 over five years.

Pore’s ECRP project, “Investigating the Fundamental Properties of the Heaviest Elements,” will use advanced experimental techniques to extract crucial data from just a handful of atoms and reevaluate the placement of these tricky elements. The studies could potentially reshape the periodic table as we know it.

Sutter-Fella’s project, “Accelerated Robotic Design of Energy Materials (ACE Lab),” aims to integrate robotics with machine learning to accelerate the discovery of new energy and quantum information materials called chiral perovskites. In collaboration with the Advanced Light Source and the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA), the ACE Lab – which will be available to the materials science community through the Molecular Foundry’s user program – will allow researchers to discover new energy materials and tune their functional properties in real time during synthesis.