TURNING POINT Joel Rosenthal

摘要

Joel Rosenthal, a chemist at the University of Delaware in Newark, was one of 30young researchers in the United States to win a 2011 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award, which provides research seed money. The award came in April from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities consortium, based in Tennessee. What was the first turning point in your career? I always thought I'd be a biologist, but as an undergraduate at New York University (NYU), I discovered a logic behind chemistry - its mechanisms and its quantitative nature - that I found compelling. Using the mechanisms underlying chemical reactions to build compounds and materials was like solving a puzzle. So I started studying organic chemistry. Then I heard Daniel Nocera, an inorganic chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, give a seminar on molecular-level mechanisms of energy conversion. I realized that inorganic chemistry offered many more avenues for researching energy storage and release than did organic chemistry. During Dan's visit to NYU, he encouraged me to apply to MIT for my PhD. I went on to study inorganic chemistry in his lab.