Chemistry professor awarded up to $2 million over 5 years

Jillian Dempsey, the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Chemistry in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, has made an illustrious career studying how to harness and convert energy from the sun.

Now she will develop new strategies for the light-driven synthesis of chemicals using metal catalysts as a winner of the prestigious Brown Investigator Award from the Brown Institute of Basic Sciences at California Institute of Technology.

The award, established in 2020, offers midcareer scientists up to $2 million for high-risk, high-reward projects that could substantially benefit society. Dempsey is the first awardee from Carolina, joining 36 other recipients since 2021.

“My hope is that these awards will provide talented midcareer researchers with stable and secure funding at a moment of their career when they are poised to make a significant impact in their field, giving them time to focus and develop their line of thinking,” said Ross M. Brown, whose philanthropic gift established the program.

Dempsey’s innovative project builds upon her experience with solar energy. At Carolina, she studies how to convert the sun’s energy into chemical fuels. She has won the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, the Air Force Young Investigator Research Program award and a coveted Sloan Research Fellowship.

Dempsey has also become a leader in the solar energy community, empowering her faculty colleagues and both graduate and undergraduate students. She serves as director of Carolina’s Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels, a hub for solar fuels research that is part of the University’s Sustainable Energy Research Consortium.

“The Brown Award offers midcareer investigators the opportunity to keep their research programs dynamic and take risks,” Dempsey said. “I’m excited that I have a chance to try something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.”

Thus far, she has explored how photons can provide the energy necessary to convert basic chemical building blocks into complex fuels. This can help overcome some of the current limitations of solar energy, such as storage and portability.

“If the energy that goes into these reactions comes from the sun, effectively, we are storing the sun’s energy in the fuel’s chemical bonds,” Dempsey said.

But Dempsey wonders if she can use her knowledge of how light energy rearranges electrons to make other complex molecules. She takes inspiration from organic chemists studying how photons can drive the creation of pharmaceuticals.

The advantages of using light to power these processes are twofold. Light energy could replace the heat typically required to drive these reactions, making them more energy efficient. But Dempsey is more interested in the other advantage: The unique ways in which photons rearrange electrons could, in conjunction with a metal catalyst, create compounds that can’t be made any other way.

“Interactions with light may give you a totally different energy landscape that leads to a different product,” Dempsey said. “These hidden reaction pathways may take us to molecules that could never otherwise be synthesized or offer a more direct and efficient way to create existing molecules.”

That sort of potential reminds Dempsey of how she started her career when the sustainable energy movement was flourishing and the downstream impacts on society were clear. She’s thankful that, after all this time, the work she loves continues to make a difference in the world.

“We can go into the lab every day ready to save the world, but we have to solve some very fundamental challenges using very basic chemistry. And we have to love that type of chemistry,” Dempsey said. “I’m grateful I found that perfect match between beautiful science that excites me and makes me curious and work where I can see the impact.”